Adios 2014

You will be missed.

Really really really this

pppppphhhhhhbbbbbbbttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

Empathy Chainsaws

"A shark with chainsaws for hands is attacking one of your classmates. How would that classmate respond? What strengths and weaknesses do they have? Will they survive? Who would likely be with that classmate? What strategies would they employ?

Leave a comment and I'll answer the prompt for somebody of your choosing! Or not!

Think Stuff

Should probably write and make stuff too....

English Teacher

Arnst Dartklin

Anybody can create.

GOOD!

Ghosty Mans OR Crimblas Trees OR Ooze or Poos

Back by demand!

Erin's descriptions of pictures!

"Is this showing a progression or a procession? (pause) Are you going to tell me?"

"No response."

"Okay, a sparsely sparse room and a sparsely sparse Christmas tree in the corner. And there are two presents and towards the foreground is an open box with ghostly men...4 ghostly mans overlapping each other coming closely to you. And, there's either a trail or just one ghost man we see moving over time. On the floor is what looks like a trail of ectoplasm and then a pair shoes thrown asunder."

"Is that all?"

"Um...the window's weird looking?"

Ported Plarnt

Drew a thing today. I had my sister describe it as if she was on the radio and had to tell people what it was.

So, first you can read that and then see what it is.

"Alright, so I'll start at the top and work my way down. So, there's a head with what looks like a man's face but with long, shoulder-length hair and a flower above its right ear. Where the neck should be...um...(long silence)...I don't know how to describe it...*deep breath*...I don't know-....not sure how to describe it...It looks like it screws the head into whatever the head is floating above. An open ring. And below that ring are little tentacles all around it--ringed with tubules--and that's the start of another head and then...two rolls of fat where the tubules are. And on the rounded body/head are a pair of glass and a thick Tom Selleck mustache."

Good job, little sister.

When asked what country/state of origin the two heads belonged to:

top: Midwest in the 1930s. Looks weathered.

bottom: like a...Polish...grandfather. Or like Grandpa Lou from the Rugrats.

So here you go then.

Karate Kick Friendship

These colors were brighter when I found them.

Dentist

Outside it's cold and raining but I'm numbed up in this future green chair like an ancient king!

Only the perfectest teeth are good enough for my mouth! Every one of us sovereign of each other, for each other.

Build me, magic man. The petty money son of a god needs chompers like the giraffe needs a scarf.

  These pods we increasingly dwell grow curiouser and curiouser.

Paper CarHopper In Wonderful Color!

The new ethos of this blog is DEMOCRACY!

Democracy. Awe-inspiring. Like a froggish cat with a hand for a tail grasping at the radio antennae on the interstate. Unreachable. Unseeable. Weird. It is an ongoing quest to nab it.

How the WoO Should Have Gone

How the Wizard of Oz should have gone:

The Tinman, a heartless automaton bent on acquiring human organs marches ceaselessly through Oz. He disregards all apple trees, poppies, the gates of the city, horses, everything. He receives his mission from the talking head, kills the witch with his mighty ax, returns the broom, rules Oz.

Meanwhile, Dorothy and Toto are left trying to coax the cowardly lion out of his paralyzing anxiety and trying to keep the brain-dead Scarecrow from eating himself and climbing back on his post.

ALL HAIL THE IRON MAN! 

Dance On Vamps

Dance dance dance!
Don't let vampires fight vampires!
Unite! Unite!
Dance dance dance!

Shaping

A lonesome quest
climbing the edge of a foggy mountain.
In the distance,
a screaming eagle is enveloped by a swarm of thirsty flies.
Small things must be feared
in rare air.

A post about dream thinks.

The Mother of Invention: Birth of a Holiday

So, my "cohort" in English Education had a Secret Santa gift-give-a-ma-jig. And, being a boy assigned to give a gift to a woman--I went to Goodwill and bought a gingerbread man wobble sundancer thing and a Halloween tote-bag to put it in. Now, on their own, those are pretty terrible gifts. And together they are confusing terrible gifts.

BUT! To justify my choices I wrote a poem the morning of the gift exchange that was presented with the gift. My take on Decemberween.

A New Hope

Has Santa gone mad?
It must be true.
Why else would he give
this mixed up present to you?

A Halloween bag
and a gingerbread wobble--
there's only one thought Santa could've had,
"Man, oh man! Christmas is in TROBBLE!"

But then he thought out an idea,
and he thought it out quick.
"What if I combine the two holidays?"
mused wily ol' Saint Nick.

"They're 55-ish days apart,
but that doesn't mean they can't be a team.
I'll take the best of both days
and call it DECEMBERWEEN!"

And all throughout the land the people made merry as they shook their 'spook-bells' and coated their Decemberween pines in velvety chocolate sauce. Lights were hung and Monster Mashes were sung. And the Rudolphs and the Zombie and the shepherds and the Frankensteins and the drummer boys and the Weremen and the Mouse Kings marveled at at the wonders Decemberween had brung...

I mean, brought.

Merry Everyone!

Afraid To Touch 5EVER!

They call me "grem". I call them...friends.

Randy Newman "Burn On"

Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted in my last post a reference to the great American musician Randy Newman. If you didn't catch it, it was the part at the bottom where I scream-typed that I was like Randy Newman. 

Sounds like a good reason to talk about Randy Newman. Here's a song I heard yesterday about the river in Cleveland that caught on fire. It's called 'Burn On'

There’s a red moon rising

On the Cuyahoga River

Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

There’s a red moon rising
On the Cuyahoga River
Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

There’s an oil barge winding
Down the Cuyahoga River
Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

There’s an oil barge winding
Down the Cuyahoga River
Rolling into Cleveland to the lake

Cleveland, city of light, city of magic
Cleveland, city of light, you’re calling me
Cleveland, even now I can remember
‘Cause the Cuyahoga River
goes smokin’ through my dreams

Burn on, big river, burn on
Burn on, big river, burn on

Now the Lord can make you tumble
Lord can make you turn
The Lord can make you overflow
But the Lord can’t make you burn

Burn on, big river, burn on
Burn on, big river, burn on

Listen here 

Why? Why should we care about this Randy Newman song? Is it because he's making a statement about pollution and our detachment from nature? Not just our detachment but our antagonistic relationship with it? Or should we care because he's being ironic, or witty, or sarcastic? Writing a song about a burning river the way people sing about normal rivers. 

No. Those are reasons. But they aren't real reasons.

I don't think there is a good reason for everyone to care about this song. I don't think Randy Newman is for everyone.

But what are the qualities of things made for everyone? It's a style of its own. It's formulaic. And that's not to say that it's lesser or not a worthy pursuit but I think there's something to be said for being unapologetically idiosyncratic. For being undramatic and small and personal and a modest, limited individual. There can be a lot of joy in that.

The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption. 

Tall Space Answers

I'M THE RANDY NEWMAN OF PHOTOGRAPHED PEN AND PAPER CARTOONS!

Make Your Own Space!

Sometimes, you don't have any sprace to stretch a leg. Stuck in a table for thrifty minutes with nothing put baper and you gotta get outta there!

Don't worry. Take a priece of paper and make a whole world wide window into a planet with space slegs and beautiful mountain ranges. It'll all be wonderfully okay.

Wasn't as productive today as I should have been

Guess that means I'll have to be double productive tomorrow...

Double cooking, double writing, double leg walking, double EVERYTHING.

Never mind. I can only do one day's work in one day's time. I'll just be one day down...forever. 

Comic for real

After defeating the rogue clones with its self-destruct-but-not-actually-destruct-the-self-explosion, the circle wanders the barren loam. Did any of the clones survive the blast? He fears the thought of a lone vengeful clone. But as panels turn to panels, a different fear creeps in. Loneliness. O Circle! Tragedy! Action! Clones!

Final Section from First Draft of Watchmen Paper

Rorschach’s ability to find order in chaos is further represented in the relationship between his speech and the images shown in the panel. The text-to-image relationship can be used create an implied, synthesized message between the image and text. This meaning is crucial for understanding how Rorschach’s actions are heroic rather than psychotic. After Rorschach has burned the murderer he describes the thoughts that occur to him as he stares at the flames. Behind the large box of text is a wall of flame and smoke for three or four (I forget) panels. The simplicity of the image makes the text-heavy panel easier to read and this could be described as a word-dependent panel but there is also a relationship between Rorschach’s eloquence and the chaos around him. He is able to articulate his thoughts best at this moment because the destructive, indiscriminate nature of fire makes sense to him. The kind of order that Dr. Long subscribes to and works to instill in his patients is founded on the idea that chaos can be overcome. However, as Dr. Long’s marriage crumbles and his wife reveals that she has been cheating on him after he has been consumed by working with Rorschach, he realizes that all of his attempts to live a decent life have led him to misery. This is an ever-present idea in the entire Watchmen novel. From Ozymandias, to the Tales of the Black Freighter, to the Minutemen, all attempts to act with best intentions and deliver the world from evil only further the problems they set out to solve. Only Rorschach and the Comedian are able to act honestly. They fight evil but never under the context of achieving good. They destroy because to act in any other way would inevitably breed more corruption and injustice under false pretenses. The honesty with which Rorschach can view disorder is conveyed in his speech about the flames delivered over the flames.
In conclusion, a graphic novel is not a textual novel with pictures included to aid in reading. Reading a graphic novel requires understanding how images, color, panels, and text relate to one another to create larger ideas. The conflict between Dr. Long and Walter Kovacs, between order and chaos, between authority and subversion, is continuously evident both in the devices that make up the chapter and the larger work of which it is a part. Formal terms for conventions aid in focusing the reader’s attention. The crucial skill all readers must develop is analyzing how patterns in the work’s elements create meaning. Like Kovacs says, the world only has the meanings we choose to impose on it. What at first appears to be a nihilist statement can also be seen as a call for active participation. Armed with the tools to understand how graphic novels are created, the reader completes their interaction with the text by recreating the story. Each element discussed demands the involvement of the reader. Cartooning asks the reader to place themselves within iconic characters. Transitions ask the reader to complete the hidden story between panels. The text and images are placed together for the reader to decide how they must be read in conjunction. Without a hero, without someone who responds to the world and text, the story cannot exist.

On the Couchtar

How can I fight the patriarchy?

Cheer up Erin

Riding two hours down the interstate with your face next to a window that will not go up. It will only to continue to fall down, slowly but surely--fall down.

The reason why I refuse to take existentialism as just another French fashion or historical curiosity, is that I think it has something very important to offer us for the new century. I'm afraid we're losing the real virtues of living life passionately in the sense of taking responsibility for who you are, the ability to make something of yourself and feel good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it's, a philosophy of despair, but I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre, once interviewed, said he never really felt a day of despair in his life. One thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as, a real kind of exuberance, of feeling on top of it, it's like your life is yours to create. I've read the post modernists with some interest, even admiration, but when I read them I always have this awful nagging feeling that something absolutely essential is getting left out. The more you talk about a person as a social construction or as a confluence of forces or as fragmented of marginalised, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre talks about responsibility, he's not talking about something abstract. He's not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians would argue about. It's something very concrete, it's you and me talking, making decisions, doing things, and taking the consequences. It might be true that there are six billion people in this world, and counting, but nevertheless -what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms, it makes a difference to other people, and it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we should never simply write ourselves off or see each other as a victim of various forces. It's always our decision who we are.

-Waking Life

Note On The Blog

This blog refuses, despite my best intentions, to assemble itself around any common identifiable theme or character or story arc or medium.

This blog will never build drama or hold your attention or ask you to hold a thought for more than a week.

This blog is an exercise. This blog is exercise. It is both intervals and reps and miles and time and the record of that information in one. Simultaneously. The marking of lines on a stone wall is both a measure of time and the product and evidence of human effort.

This blog is the distrust of calendars. Calendars that insist on marking the passage of time for me. No wonder that time flies. We give up control of time and let it run wild. This blog is my record of time. And you will not find only numbers and dates that can be whisked through. You will find frustrations and memories and chunks and bits of thought and emotions. You will not wave it away and wonder where it went. You will not find any thread to pull you along or guess the ending or "skip over the middle part". It is only beginnings! Every day a beginning! Every day new rules!

This blog is an exercise in vocabulary. It is a distrust of dictionaries. A vocabulary limits what is and is not possible. You can build something out of a vocabulary. You can do stuff with it. But the more you do the more you depend on the steadiness and the consistency of that vocabulary. And to that I say, WHY BOTHER!? I have boundless electronic paper and endless electronic type. What greater goal is there, what greater limit, than to always demand the expansion what is possible--to always push against what seemingly cannot, will not, should not be done? If great kingdoms and statues and monuments can rise from sand--and if their might is dependent on the wealth of the sand--then I limit myself to piling sand on sand! More sand! Each granule a masterpiece! Each dune a worthless pile of raw material or waste.

That's what this blog is about.

Hungrullet

Socks can't fit giants; gnomes can't sneeze quiet

Still adorable though

Gotta keep it up

More more more more WATCHMEN!

So we talked about cartooning and images and that was great. Every reader is glued to their eyeballs when they read these words with no-pictures-included talking about pictures. Well I'm sorry. I don't want to go hunt down the pictures I'm describing because I do enough work as it is and if you haven't gotten the clue by now it's really time for you to go read Watchmen already!

Read it! I'm not. joking. It's really good. Just read it. You'll know what I'm talking about. You'll be in the cool kid club and everything.

Okay, here we go.

Before we talk about Watchmen we gotta get some knowledge-water from the Scott McCloud-well. I'm gonna be honest, though. I read the book last week and I don't feel like looking up what I'm about to tell you. So this is as best as I can remember:

GUTTERS AND TRANSITIONS AND CLOSURE!

Now we have some words. Some difficult words. Let's define them.

Gutters- You know how when you're reading a comic it's not one picture on a page but a whole bunch of little pictures in little boxes? And the reason you know they're boxes is because there is space between them. There's little spaces between the boxes.  Check the Funny section if you don't believe me. Those are called gutters.

Woosh! We're flying along.

Transitions--actually, I'm not going to explain transitions yet. We'll talk about closure next. What Scott McCloud says is that when you read a comic you look at the little box and you look at the pictures and read the words and then when you're done with that picture you cross over the gutter and read the next little box. And the--

SLOW DOWN COWBOY!! A LOT JUST HAPPENED THERE!

You might not think the gutter is very important because it's a little blank space that's called a "gutter" which is normally where waste and dirty bad things end up but it's actually where a huge amount of the story takes place.

Let's do a replay. And, no, I'm not going to provide pictures. We'll do it all with words. If you want pictures get a Watchmen.

We're looking at a little box in our comic and it's a picture of a mouse, an anthropomorphic mouse, wearing a hat, with a haggard-looking face, leaving his house and grumbling to his wife, "Hey, Midge! I'm stepping out for a bit."

And then in the next panel we see the same mouse but now he's at the community center, overjoyed at the fact that he's just made his first successful paper swan all by himself at his biweekly origami class.

What your brain does, because it's so good at making meaning out of things that it's scary, is fill in the gap between those two pictures and make up a story to relate them to each other. That occurs in the gutter. Your brain really wants those two pictures to be related. It would get mad and frustrated if they weren't. And that process of relating one picture to the next is called closure. It's kind of like the pictures give you point A and point B and closure is the path you figure out in between.

Now we're ready to talk about transitions. Transitions refer to the difference--or the amount of brain work required to have closure-- between any two sequential pictures. Because, there can be all kinds of differences between images and some take way more assuming and work to reconcile than others.

Let's go back to the mouse. The scene we described would be a scene-to-scene transition. And those take a decent amount of work to bring about closure. We have to assume a lot to get from grumbly mouse "stepping out" to mouse at the origami class. Is he lying to his wife about it? Is he just not excitable except when folding paper? It wasn't what we expected based on the first panel. We had to travel space and time to get there.

That's scene to scene.

Now let's say that after the first panel, the mouse just stood in the same spot without any speech. He yelled to Midge, and then just stood there as if he was waiting to hear a response. That would be a moment-to-moment transition. It's like, the very next second and no action really occurred. It takes almost no work.

Action-to-action is next. Let's say the mouse yells at Midge and then slams the door behind him. That would be an action-to-action. Again, very little work needed for closure.

Plopping right along we get to subject-to-subject. This one gets a little tricky and I caved and pulled out the book which says its a new subject but in the same scene or idea. So maybe our first example would be subject to subject. It's still the mouse and he's still "stepping out". Another example of subject-to-subject would be the mouse yelling and then we see a car pulling away from a house. That takes a little less reader involvement.

There are 6 of these, by the way.

 Skipping over scene-to-scene, we get to the tricky one called aspect-to-aspect. McCloud says it "bypasses time for the most part and sets a wandering eye on different aspects of a place, idea or mood." This transition isn't very narrative-y. It's just taking in different things. Like we have the mouse yelling and we're just kind of looking at close-ups of his mouse body and clothing items and such. There isn't a progression of time or story. We're just stopping to look him over. It's still different from moment to moment because our view is changing and he isn't really doing anything.

Finally, the easy one---non-sequitur. Two seemingly unrelated images. Mouse yells. Hyenas devouring cloud babies. It's nonsense. You can still probably relate them but it takes a lot of work and you're probably frustrated or uncertain about it.

Every comic, by virtue of being a comic, uses these transitions--maybe not all of them--but at least some. It's a decision you make when you decide what the next image will be. How much will it advance the story? How much are you leaving up to the reader? It can also have a lot to do with how you perceive the passage of time in the comic. Or how "exciting" the comic is--the pacing and such.

GUTTERS! TRANSITIONS! CLOSURE! Hopefully those words mean more to you now than they did before you read the stuff there.

Now we're ready to look at Rorschach/Kovacs again.

At the top of page 9, Dr. Malcolm Long (until now has been referred to as "psychiatrist"), sits down to talk with Kovacs. What follows is a back-and-forth between the Dr. Long and Kovacs as Dr. Long asks Kovacs to tell him about Rorshach. I'd say this is a subject-to-subject transition. We look at the doctor then Kovacs, then back to the doctor, then Kovacs.

But then. On the final panel, we go from a waist-up shot of Kovacs from the doctor's side of the table to an extreme close-up of Kovacs face as he says, "I'll tell you about Rorshach."

Why is this important? We've gone from subject-to-subject transition to a moment-to-moment transition. Kovacs face fills the panel completely and we realize that Kovacs is in complete control. He is the dominant personality and what he is about to tell you is really important. This moment-to-moment transition has highlighted the transition we are about to make into Rorshach's story and it's probably going to make us uncomfortable. That's what Dr. Long talks about at the very beginning of the chapter when he says, "I just wish he wouldn't stare at me like that." We're uncomfortably close to Rorshach's face before we delve into Rorshach's bleak view of the world. Kovacs breaks the doctor completely by the end of the chapter. Dr. Long goes from a successful happy man to a depressed mess over the course of a few conversations. To convey that psychic weight, the gravitational pull that drags the doctor down into the muck, we are literally, as readers, sucked into Rorschach's consciousness--hence the moment-to-moment transition. We go from being able to see Kovacs's face to being able to see nothing else but Kovacs's face.

Next one...I have a really good one for the last one but first you get this okay one which is still pretty cool but not as cool as the last one.

Second one:

On page 18 there's an amazing transition that I don't even know what you would call. We'll try to figure it out. In the top row of panels we get moment-to-moment transitions in a top-down view of  Kovacs, Dr. Long, and the table they are sitting at. In the middle of the table, between them, is a rorshach inkblot. As Kovacs begins to talk we zoom until we can only see the table and the inkblot. In the next panel the inkblot fills the panel. Kovacs is giving background information on how he found about the missing girl and who her kidnapper was. So in three panels we've zoomed in on the inkblot as Kovacs is taking us into the story,

Then!

In what is both a moment-to-moment and scene-to-scene transition (wuuuuuuu-hat?) the next thing we see is Rorshach's mask filling the panel as Rorshach peers through a gap in a fence into the yard of the building he's about to enter. We've traveled great distances through space and time but the picture has changed very little as we go from the inkblot to Rorshach's mask.

What's going on here? Besides being a clever thing. I think, yet again, it has to do with the way Rorshach views the world. We go from an inkblot test (a test all about seeing) to Rorshach looking into the yard. But, more than that, this is a story that is mediated by Rorshach's ideas and values. If we had a broad, establishing shot of the whole scene, it would feel more like a discrete objective story. Instead, we enter in through Rorshach's view and we are keenly aware of what Rorshach is thinking and doing. That transition is about preserving the connection between Kovacs telling his story and Rorshach doing things that will permanently set him on his course. Does that make sense? This type of transition actually occurs all throughout the book and its always used to tell the reader, "Hey! That underlying message you just gathered from that previous scene--it's about to be TOTALLY RELEVANT to this next scene if though this next scene is completely different. All of these seemingly disparate events are connected. Anyway, Kovacs is pulling the reader in again and showing you his view and this is why he sees the world the way he does. This is his mission statement his scene, it establishes his style and is where theory meets practice.

Okay, now for the really cool one.

Full disclosure: it's not strictly a transition but overall it's too cool of a thing to not include so here goes:

On page 23, the murderer guy has come back to his house and he's walking around for an entire page, looking for his dogs, and then

SMASH! The panel layout changes from a 3x3 grid to one wide panel taking up the entire top row as a bloodied dog carcass flies through a window right in front of the murderer man.

The middle section is a row of three panels. The man sputters and wonders what is happening.

SMASH! Another dog flies through a window behind him and hits him in the back. Again the entire row is one long panel.

Symmetry! This is a symmetrical panel layout And one of the few pages to NOT use the 3x3 layout. That's a way of telling you THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT! And there's another symmetry. The dogs fly in from the front at the top of the page and from the back at the bottom of the page. Rorshach is making this guy lose his mind with fear and he's doing it in a brutally symmetrical way. These are action-to-action scenes meant to highlight the order of Rorshach's ruthlessness.

He tells Dr. Long earlier that he is compelled to act against evil. And I think part of that compulsion is the inspiration he gets in carrying out these acts. He sees order and patterns in doing things like throwing dog carcasses through windows. As a reader, I see a reflection of an inkblot in this page. It's another thing that makes Kovac's story so compelling. At his most intense, his most violent, he's in complete control. There's no messy struggle with this murderer. In two moves Rorshach completely ruins the guy without even being seen. Whereas Rorschach is able to thrive in the darkness, Dr. Long seemingly perfect life falls into chaos and disorder. The assumptions the doctor has made about humanity, society, and justice fall away and he's forced to see the world as it is and realize that he is desperately unfit for it. Dr. Long is the one who needs help.

And that's all I have to say about TRANSITIONS!

A Late Night Third Installment of Thoughts About Watchmen

Final thing I want to say about the drawings/art in general before we move on to the panels and the text/image interactions--here we go.

What color is Walter Kovacs hair? WHAT COLOR IS IT?

It's red. He has red hair.

That will be important later. Hold on to it.

So, when Walter Kovacs is talking to the psychiatrist/psychologist man he finally decides that he will tell him about Rorshach and how he came to assume that identity. The first thing he explains is how he (Rorshach) came to split the dog's head open. We go into a flashback that is told completely through images of Rorshach breaking in to a house where he suspects a kidnapper has taken a little girl. As Rorshach is walking around the house, finding things, looking at stuff, everything is MAJORLY BROWN. The wood, the house, Rorshach's coat. Everything is brown. Then we turn the page as Rorshach discovers a knife in a cupboard filled with knives. And Rorshach notices a cutting board with deep meat cleaver cuts in it.

As you read the panels on the page the colors get continually more red until Rorshach notices dog's outside in the yard fighting over and gnawing on large bones. The last panel is an extreme close up of Rorshach's mask colored only in shades of blood red. In the next page the panels return to brown as Rorshach steps outside with the knife. The middle panel of the page is a close up of a hand with a raised knife colored with dark shadows and deep reds. Cut back to Walter Kovacs who says that at this moment he closed his eyes and felt a jet of hot blood on his chest and it was Rorshach who opened his eyes again. The final panel is another close up of the Rorshach inkblot colored in the same deep red as the final panel on the previous page.

What does this color tell us about Rorschach/Walter Kovacs? To me, its representing his transformation into Rorshach. We know what he stands for, we know what he projects on to the world, and then we finally get this tinting of the images. Red can represent blood, anger ,madness, rage, passion, everything that motivates Rorshach's actions. What I really like though is the progression of color. That growing dominance really shows the transformation that takes place when Rorshach discovers what has happened to the girl. And on the following page we see another progression of red as Rorshach attacks the dogs and re-inflicts that pain. Again there is that symmetry in the color and Rorshach's response to evil. Or what he sees as evil anyway.

The color shows Rorshach's mental state and even provides a commentary on the scene that words and images could not convey as well. We know Rorshach discovers that the bones are the girl's bones because of that bright red that has been building in the previous panels. And then it comes back again later in the story as a way of symbolizing both the world Rorshach inhabits and his reaction to it.

Playing with your brain to create meaning. It's pretty cool.

More Watchmen Ramblings

What'd we talk about last time?

Icons. Rorshach's mask. Identification. Hero. Idealism.

That sounds right.

Well, ol' Scotty McCloud says that the icon/abstract street runs both ways! And by that I mean that if more cartoonish means more iconic and identifiable then realism and gritty detail mean things are more literal, more objectifiable, removed from the realm of our awareness and a part of the outside world. If I show the little smiley button from the cover of the Watchmen book you'll think, "Oh, it's my buddy." But if I show a hyper-detailed drawing of a guy smiling you'll think, "Who is that guy?" It's separated from you because it looks like the things that you actually look at and not the way you imagine things that are part of you.

So how does that relate to Watchmen? Specifically Rorshach. Well, and I'm just going to take a stab at it here, when Rorshach looks at the inkblot that the psychiatrist presents to him, before he answers there is an immediate sudden transition to a glory, bloody close-up panel of a dog with its head cut open. I felt rude just typing that.

But I think the message is that this is the gruesome way that Rorshach views the world. The brutality makes us recoil and fear the violence that Rorshach dwells in. It's foreign to us and the psychiatrist who naively believes he can make an optimist out of Rorshach. Rorshach is a traumatized, abused, sociopath and there's a very scary way to be. All though Rorshach holds himself to high standards and ideals, the world as he sees it as a barren, awful, disgusting place. There is no innate human good or benevolent force that would shape Rorshach's view. He sees only a dog with its head split open and he must act against that horror. With equally brutal acts. But, for Rorshach, with the way he views the world, there is no other way for him to act. There is no good that he could harness. He only stands for inflicting the pain back on itself. To be 'good', for Rorshach, is to either do nothing and believe that the world will work itself out or to lie to yourself about what you are actually doing.

And that's all shown by the realism in the dog head that Rorshach sees. And all the other gore and violence that tends to follow Rorshach around. But I like the dog head.

I mean, I don't like it. I just like using it as an example.

...think about bunnies now.

Educational Nerdular Nerdence #1

For my final project in my Young Adult Literature class I am writing a research paper that looks at how V for Vendetta and Watchmen (Alan Moore's graphic novels turned movies) can be taught in a secondary English classroom.

The bulk of the paper is spent looking at V's televised speech in Chapter 3 and 4 of Book II of V for Vendetta and Rorshach's origin story in  Chapter 6 of Watchmen (The Abyss Gazes Also).

You: That's so cool Andy! But what are you gonna say about graphic novels?

Great question, the You. Well, when most Englishy people look at Englishy things they talk about the conventions that writers use to construct meaning. This is why you learn about similes, metaphors, alliteration, juxtaposition--it's a writer playing with parts of your brain to make you think what they want you to think. Or at least point you in a certain direction. And that's great and there's all kinds of things you can do with words on a page.

BUT! Graphic novels have PICTURES and WORDS on a page! And people who know about pictures also know all kinds of things about how picture-makers make meaning (line, form, color, perspective).

But! Graphic novels have WORDS and PICTURES on a page!

So it's not just word-meaning making and picture-meaning making smashed together and independent of each other. Graphic novels have unique tricks and conventions that neither writing nor drawing can do on their own.

FUUUSSSSSIIIOOOONNNNNN!!!

You: That's so cool Andy! But what are those things that graphic novels can do that nobody else can?

Glad you asked, the You. This really smart guy named Scott McCloud wrote a book called Understanding Comics that you should totally read and I'm about to take his ideas and regurgitate them to you in a much less effective way.

Here's 3  1 Things that Scott McCloud says comics can do (and I will show how Alan Moore does them too)

1. Cartoons!

 So, cartoons are actually separate from comics. Cartooning is a kind of drawing (that just about all comics use). Comics are more about what you do with those drawings. McCloud calls cartooning AMPLIFICATION THROUGH SIMPLIFICATION! Cartoons take away information that isn't necessary for the point you're trying to make in a drawing so the meaning is a lot easier to gather.

If I want to draw an angry cartoon man, I don't need ears. Ears have nothing to do with anger. I just draw a circle with two dots, an upside down 'U', and a 'V' above the dots. That makes it really easy for you to figure out what I'm trying to show you--there's very little ambiguity.

And because that meaning is so clear, the drawing/ cartoon becomes more ICONIC! It has more specific communicative ability. You aren't thinking about who this guy is because there isn't really any extraneous information about him. You're thinking about what he is.

And here's the really cool part. McCloud says that because there is so little to know about this iconic character's identity, it acts as a VACUUM that sucks YOUR identity and awareness into you it. You can't help but identify with that character and put yourself in that situation.

You: WHY?! Why is that true??!

It's complicated. But what McCloud says is that your face is like a mask. A mask that you can't see. But you can control it and you still know what you look like when you do stuff with your face. McCloud argues that whenever you use your face you are keeping a simplified representation of your own face in your mind. To keep tabs on yourself. You create iconic representations of everything that is a part of your awareness and identity. This includes your face and other things that you consider a part of you: your clothes, objects that you hold, even the car that you drive become a part of you and have this iconic representation.

So when you see a cartoon version of something, it is represented in the way that you think about things that are a part of yourself. THAT'S why comics draw you in.

Crazy, right?

This is getting long so instead of moving on to other stuff that comics can do, let's talk about Rorshach and his awesome mask.

Ever seen a picture of Rorshach from Watchmen? He's the one with the black and white splotchy face in the trenchcoat.

The reason that is Rorshach's mask has everything to do with cartooning. And it's the same reason that Rorshach is everyone's favorite character. Or should be. Or it's the same reason that he's my favorite character.

Before Rorshach was Rorschach he was a scrawny 16-year-old hooligan with no parents named Walter Kovacs who got a job as a manual worker in the garment industry. 6 years later there's an order for this dress that has special fluids that cause the pattern to change with heat and pressure. It looks all "ink-blotty" all the time. Kovacs thought it was beautiful "black and white moving. Changing shape...but not mixing. No gray". The lady who ordered it thought it was hideous so Kovacs takes it home and cuts it up so it doesn't look like a dress anymore and forgets about it. 2 years later Kovacs finds out that the woman who ordered the dress was raped, tortured, and killed outside her apartment while over forty of her neighbors looked on and did nothing. It is at this point that Kovacs returns to the fabric and uses it to create  "a face that I could bear to look at in the mirror".

BIG QUESTION: WHY IS THIS THE FACE THAT KOVACS CAN BEAR TO LOOK AT?!

The simple answer is that it is an abstraction--it is an icon that represents everything Rorshach stands for. How can we describe Rorshach's "crime-fighting style"? Draconian and Retributive Justice sum it up fairly well. For Rorshach, there is only right and wrong. No "gray" areas of morality. And when someone does wrong it is his compulsion to violently attack that wrong doer--to inflict that pain back on to them. The degree of his punishment is irrelevant because for Rorshach there are no degrees of crime. If you do wrong, he kills you.

So, like his mask, like a Rorshach test, like Rorshach's way of seeing, his actions are symmetrical and black and white. Cut and dry. This is the idea, the ethos, that Rorschach finds beautiful and uses as his mask that allows him to look at himself. He is unlike 'the people' who he is repulsed by who do nothing to stop injustice and are passive. They stand for nothing. They are just faces that reflect the human qualities of cowardice, hypocrisy, and passivity. Rorshach is an idea.

And that's why you root for Rorshach. His voice opens the entire book and you identify with that blank, abstracted face because it acts as the lens you use to view the Watchmen world. It's Rorshach's journal that provides his inner-narrative and gives you another tool to see the world from Rorshach's view. We learn to see the world the way Rorshach sees it, we are given visual, iconic cues. We also "think" the way Rorshach thinks through reading his inner monologue.

It's not just a face. A face with details that you would associate with someone else. It's an abstracted face. The way you imagine your own face but taken to the extreme. To identify with Rorshach is to almost give up human-nature all together and embody an unwavering ideal--justice in a primitive, violent sense. But, given everything else that goes on in Watchmen, which has a lot to do with good intentions going horribly horribly wrong and everything wrapped in moral ambiguity and uncertainty, Rorshach starts to make a whole lot of sense.

That's part ONE!

The Brain Knight

Great evening, everyone. I am the narrwhale--the narrating whale.

Today I woke up outside of my house yet again. I don't think I'll ever be able to get my slice of the white-wash pie. I just can't fit.

The Brain Knight returned. He desired to engage the Math Dragon in mortal combat. The Brain Knight pulsates like a super-heated can of baked beans stuffed with metaphors and equations. The Math Dragon just wants to rob convenience stores. In literary circles, the Math Dragon would be the foil of the Brain Knight. They are totally opposite in every way.

I got real hungry watching them prepare to fight. I'm sure their battle was impressive and memorable, but I was not paying attention. It isn't easy being a narrwhale.  I always just seem to get in the way and everyone ends up being compared to baked beans.

------------------------------------------------------

Unrelated True Note:

Today I was walking back to my apartment from the School of Ed and someone had run over a squirrel on the road I cross. It was lying in the center of the road. I grabbed some sticks and tried to pick it up and move it out of the road. I didn't do a very good job of picking it up but I did get it out of the road.

I think normally I would have ignored the squirrel but it just seemed wrong to leave it in the middle of the road to be run over again. I'm glad I moved it. Some people walking by saw me and I must have looked pretty strange struggling to move this squirrel with two sticks. It was important for me to acknowledge that death and do something about it. No, it probably doesn't really make a difference what happens to a squirrel after it dies but in that moment it mattered very much to me.

And I'm not trying to say that I did this good thing or I'm this better person because of it. It just showed me that there's a big difference between passively watching something and actively trying to do what you think is right. It's so stupid that animals have to die just so we can have cars. Yes, cars are very important and yes, animals die all the time but you wouldn't think about that the first time you have to clumsily drag an animal across the street--an animal that is normally so full of life and quick that you couldn't even imagine touching one and now it can't do anything and is at the complete mercy of your gross incompetence. Blood in its mouth and around its eyes. It's just wrong and what you are doing makes you aware of how little you can possibly do. But I'm sure I would do it again and I think you should too.

Drawing in class returned for today at least

When we gamble with our time we choose our destiny.

"From honor roll to cracking bikes up off them bicycle racks/.../And them eyes where he hiding all them icicles at" - Earl Sweatshirt, Chum

"Hated for bank lifting and spraying then hide away in the shade of his maimed innocence"- Earl Sweatshirt, Whoa

What do we notice?

-referring to self in 3rd person. (Is Earl 'him'/'he'? Refers to self in 1st person in other lines)
-robbery (stealing bikes, lifting banks)
-Hiding. (he hides in his maimed innocence and the icicles hide in his eyes)

What do we take away?

Well, it seems like Earl is observing and describing the various contradictory layers of himself.

Based on his actions (stealing, robbing), he's a bad, troubled dude. But after doing these things he hides in the shade of his maimed innocence. He still appears young and innocent. He looks way too young to be experiencing all of these problems and it might allow him to get away with these things while also further harming himself.

But then, hidden within that hidden-ness are the icicles in his eyes. If you really looked at Earl--looked him in the eyes--you'd see all the bitterness and anger. And in the third person, Earl is looking at himself with that iciness.

He's really hard on himself. The whole song, Chum, is detailing how he turned the pain of his father leaving him into hard drinking and rapping. By the end of the song he says 'I already feel like calling it quits."

But I don't think Earl is pitying himself or making himself out to be a tragic figure. As he says in the chorus, "Get up off the pavement, brush the dirt up off my psyche...psyche...psyche."

He's picking himself up and brushing himself off. He knows he's not perfect. He knows he's been way down before and stepped on by circumstance and people close to him. Rapping is an outlet for his pain. But it can also cause more pain. But it's also, unlike his real life, a place where doesn't have to hide--a place where he can talk about the hiding he does.

He's Earl Sweatshirt. Through words, his identity is exactly what he constructs it to be. When he raps, he's not this mixed up person who looks too young or too white or too black and has to hide, he's honest.

The people want ROLES not GOALS!

Today my favorite runner, Ben Blankenship, won the Kansas City Road Mile by almost 9 seconds.

That is a quite a lot of seconds to win a mile by. He ran 4:04. That's about ten seconds slower than the fastest mile he has ever run. 

He is my favorite runner because he has long hair and a certain weirdness about him. For example, when he made a twitter account he actually used the picture I made of him where I drew over a tracing of his face the mouths and heads of various animals. He used that. And he gives entertaining interviews. Without trying to be entertaining. Some athletes try too hard to give good interviews. Ben Blankenship is a straight shooter with a penchant for...his own no-style style achievement. 

My dad taught me about no-style style. It's like the Bruce Lee style of kung-fu but for sunglasses and pants. 

Today I bought a sweater that looks like it was molded out of compressed dryer lint.

 

This sweater contains whole galaxies. It is large. It contains multitudes.

To a Love Most Precious

These words that try to contain and frame can only skew and distort the feelings that have already fallen from the branch of the heart and are left to shrivel and die.

Coffee machine. Your spirit is tremendous. You complete me. Like a jigsaw puzzle solved with super glue, you put me together in ways that only chemical assistance can.

But we're all really just brains in jars reacting to chemicals anyway.

To my second brain. The apple of my darling and the steward of my everyone. You are three times my steed.

Sweet coffee machine.

He Stains All That He Touches

See the couch. He sat on it and left the 9 on it.

This is How I Live

Sometimes, I feel as if I can almost grasp the experience of the Rapmen.

I too feel boisterous and extravagant. My apartment boasts plenty of natural lighting and tapestries from far off lands.

If only I possessed a funky beat, and rhythm, and skills.

Oh well, even if I can never fit it to sixteen bars, I know the love and arrogance still beats in the chambers of my heart.

Rapping.

Lopp

Blog has been a bit neglected as of late. Oops.

I still have more posts for the year than all of last year though so if you want more things you should stop and be thankful that it isn't 2013 anymore!

Go back and read some of this year's instant classics...like...um...that one picture of the guy with the giant brain sitting on a pile of books while a train goes by in the background.

That's a winner.

Anyway, school is very consuming so I haven't had much time for the blog.

Read A Wrinkle in Time today. Strange book. A little disappointing.

Also did Comedybrew audition with a comedy powerpoint. I think it went well. I hope I make it to the final.

Be lovely.

Here's a picture of Luke's corner that writes its own response.

Pumpkin. For an Adjective Activity

I am large, round, and plump. I have a wrinkled, stubby stem. I am powerful. I am surrounded by all of my friends, and we are earthy and smooth. We are deep like an ocean. We are tall like a mountain. If you roll me down a hill and I crash into a Honda Civic, the explosion will be loud, pulpy, sticky, and orange.

7 sentences. 14 adjectives. GET AT ME!

All the Things School

No time for the posting.

Working on Comedybrew audition though with images from Snack Menus.

Comedy PowerPoint? Let's try!

Suspicious!

An Exercise in Shared Spaces 5

WHY WON'T ANYONE EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THIS CONE GOT HERE?!

Is this where cones should live?

A Bird On the Very Tippy Tup of a Tree

What a hoss.

Steering Wheels Also Make Great Celery Holders

Because sometimes you gotta pump that gas.

An Exercise in Shared Spaces 4

I don't have a picture of it, but today Luke was eating dark chocolate on the couch and somehow lost track of it and melted the chocolate with his body heat on my pillows. He realizes what he's done, holds up the pillow and says, 'I pooped on your pillow!'

Then he washed it. The poop pillow.

The Chanting Fellows

An Exercise in Shared Spaces 3

Oct 8th- a cup hidden behind MY nalgene.

Scene 1:

(cup is sitting in the middle of the table for the second day in a row)

Me: Hey Luke, are you going to use that cup again?

Luke: No, probably not.

Me: Could you throw it out?

Luke: Yeah. Sure.

(Luke picks up cup and goes to sink and fills it with water. Steps outside and sits on stoop)

Me: Cool.

(I exit and head to class)

(Luke sips his water and grins a fiendish grin)

Luke: He'll never know! He'll never know!

(Luke transforms into a wrinkly green hideous creature---something that could only be described as the spawn of a were-hyena and a giant brussel sprout. He licks his chops as his twisted brain hatches a most dastardly plan. He enters the apartment)

Luke: In this spot, the cup will remain for a dozen millennia and chaos and clutter will reign supreme!

(Luke transforms back into his normal Luke mode, eats an entire brick of cheese coated in Old Bay and Hemp Protein Powder and wanders around campus, takes like seven dumps, until he stumbles into the class he's 25 minutes late for)

(an hour or so later, I return to the apartment. I discover the cup.)

Me: ...really? He must be crazy.    

An Exercise in Shared Spaces 2

October 7th- Red iPod left in case on table in full view from side door made entirely of window. (also, knife)

Luke,

Let's talk about the flightless cormorant of the Galapagos Islands. It is a very unique bird. For thousands of years, the flightless cormorant had no natural predators. As a result, it lost the ability to fly in exchange for growing fat off of diving along the coast of the island.

"Flying?" *shrug*
from wikimedia commons

Just to clarify, when an animal has no enemies, it exchanges adaptations that help it escape for adaptations that help it fall in the water with its mouth open and stuff whatever it lands on inside of itself.

"Why would anything bad ever happen to me? Yuck yuck yuck!"
from wikimedia commons

Why am I telling you this? Because you have no natural predators, Luke. Like the flightless cormorant, who became dominant by trusting that life would always be good while the more paranoid, flighty cormorants starved from fear of their own shadow, you thrive in the knowledge that the land has and always will be kind.

But this is a cautionary story. Because eventually man discovered the Galapagos Islands. And when man arrived with his dogs and cats and pigs, they all found a bird that was not only incapable of escaping, but had no desire to escape. It was a bird that would walk right up to a large predator and allow itself to be picked up, coddled, and/or devoured.

This brave new world, that has such people in it, has not been kind to the flightless cormorant, Luke. It's basically just a pity project to keep this thing alive at this point.

And that is why I am stealing your iPod. Like a hardened, grizzled flightless cormorant who knows that the only chance for saving the species is to whip these stubby-winged, tea-time loving, namby-pambies into beasts of war. You gotta get mad! You gotta get mean! We can't just keep using our adorableness and our ability to breed quickly to make our problems go away! And do your dishes!

Love,

Andy

P.S. Who still has a 2nd generation iPod Nano??? Those came out in like 2006!

An Exercise In Shared Spaces

For every day of this month of October 2014 I'm going to take a picture of something my roommate leaves around the apartment and reflect.

Monday October 6th: a jar of Trader Joe's coconut oil was left open on the kitchen counter with the lid lying next to it.

Luke,

I do not understand. Living with you and trying to piece together the logic of your actions makes me weary. I conclude that you must live like a lab mouse in a maze. You have no larger sense of the world around you, only a series of unrelated turns and decisions that sometimes add up to cheese. You cannot look back, you cannot look ahead. You can only act in the moment and leave open containers of food scattered about the apartment--exposed to the elements--attracting all manner of vermin and microscopic spoilers of the air and my scorn. O, my scorn. My scorn that rises like a phoenix from its own ashes every morning when I witness the scrambled tatters of your myopic hustle and bustle as you fart your way in and out of this apartment.

Love,

Andy

Like this sometimes

Skinny legs on thick sweater boy

The misshapen, misinformed, deformed life form rolling on the morbid loam looking for home.

Needing protection. A rusty tragic wagon seeking the scaled beast to be his trusty magic dragon.

Hungry. Waggle noodle arms reach for the backpack packed full of Lucky Charms--these marshmallow bites seem to be his only rations.

No narrative evident, no plot to intuit, just skinny legs on thick sweater boy with a red balloon until he blew it.

Scribbles on paper so its obviously fake, nobody takes a stake in a life that's play for play's sake.
You're you for as long as you can stay awake but after that
then what difference do these words make?
Pulpy-lumpy grumpy boy with bumps in his sweater like he smuggles puppies to avoid

lonely stretches like his lips pulled broad and trembling ,

whispered mumbling speech lost beneath the sound of his stomach grumbling

wishing he could be crushed by tumbling fruit that now sends the ground rumbling.

Flower: One who flows.

Read me!
Read me! Read me in many lights and tones. Redbluegreenyellowpurpleredbluegreenyellowpurple.
Read me ways upside down fantastic and too bright too dark!
Read me grey and slow with strain and spittle.

Read me lazy slurring slipping loud and waving.

This melting wax of text explodes in crystal shards

that pierce your eyes and stick in your lobes like

dum dumb dur dum burn dum.

Free up the solar system and read me like hidden planets.
This change is strange and rattles on ribs beneath the skin.

I absorb you. I contain you. This move is for grooves unknown whistles and claps.

Read me awash in words and sounds and hungry branches and roots
because that is what I am.