R.I.P. Bettie Page

Here's part of her obituary from the L.A. Times:
Bettie Page, the brunet pinup queen with a shoulder-length pageboy hairdo and kitschy bangs whose saucy photos helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, has died. She was 85.

Page, whose later life was marked by depression, violent mood swings and several years in a state mental institution, died Thursday night at Kindred Hospital in Los Angeles, where she had been on life support since suffering a heart attack Dec. 2, according to her agent, Mark Roesler.

A cult figure, Page was most famous for the estimated 20,000 4-by-5-inch black-and-white glossy photographs taken by amateur shutterbugs from 1949 to 1957. The photos showed her in high heels and bikinis or negligees, bondage apparel -- or nothing at all.

Decades later, those images inspired biographies, comic books, fan clubs, websites, commercial products -- Bettie Page playing cards, dress-up magnet sets, action figures, Zippo lighters, shot glasses -- and, in 2005, a film about her life and times, "The Notorious Bettie Page."

According to her agents at CMG Worldwide, Page's official website, www.BettiePage.com, has received about 600 million hits over the last five years.

A religious woman in her later life, Page was mystified by her influence on modern popular culture. "I have no idea why I'm the only model who has had so much fame so long after quitting work," she said in an interview with The Times in 2006.

She had one request for that interview: that her face not be photographed.

"I want to be remembered," she said, "as I was when I was young and in my golden times. . . . I want to be remembered as the woman who changed people's perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form."

RIP, Forrest J Ackerman

Forrest J Ackerman died on Thursday at age 92. Any kid who grew up in the 60's and loved monster movies would save their allowance to pick up the latest copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland, and I was no exception. Reading that magazine and drawing crude pictures from the photos therein propelled me deeper into exploring monster movies I had never seen, and inspired me to expand my interest into moviemaking in general.
Marveling at the pictures of Ackerman's astonishing collection of movie memorabilia also made clear the craft of moviemaking, from the close up photos of the stop-motion armatures from King Kong to the wonderfully lurid and endearingly cheesy posters from 50's sci-fi movies. His mansion and collection was a treasure trove of inspiration and imagination, and it satisfied (vicariously) my own urge to collect.
He was a pop culture historian, and by virtue of that became a pop culture icon in his own right.
Here's the obit from BoingBoing:
Forrest J Ackerman, the pioneering science fiction fan, editor and writer who coined the term "sci-fi," founded Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, 4e left the party on December 4, at 92, after a long illness. of heart failure at home at the legendary Ackermansion in Los Feliz in Los Angeles.
Among those who grew up reading Famous Monsters of Filmland was author Stephen King. Other childhood readers included movie directors Joe Dante, John Landis and Steven Spielberg, who once autographed a poster of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" for Ackerman, saying, "A generation of fantasy lovers thank you for raising us so well.
Ackerman was a celebrity in his own right, once signing 10,000 autographs during a three-day monster-movie convention in New York City. This, after all, was the man who created and wrote the comic book characters Vampirella and Jeanie of Questar and was the ultimate fan's fan: a man who actually had known Lugosi and Karloff and whose priceless collection of science-fiction, horror and fantasy artifacts ran to some 300,000 items.

The Barack Obama Mighty Mugg says: "Seven Days Until 'The End of an Error'!"

My wee Obama Mighty Mugg encourages you all to cast your vote next Tuesday! (if you haven't already via absentee ballot or early voting)
The most important thing, regardless of who you support, is that you get out and make your vote count - although - the most intelligent, creative, evolved, articulate, caring and forward-thinking of us cool people are going to be voting for Obama & Biden, just in case for some reason you were still undecided.
If you're interested in building our economy and putting people back to work; if you're interested in exploring (and actually funding) new and innovative energy technologies that once and for all stops the stranglehold the oil industry has on us; if you're interested in providing quality affordable health care for every American; if you're interested in equality - that is, equal rights for same sex couples and pay for women in the workforce; if you're interested in rebuilding (and actually funding) an education system that not only educates but inspires kids; if you're interested in really taking care of the men and women who serve our country (both as soldiers and as veterans); if you're interested in if you're interested in halting the greed-fueled and illegal expansionist doctrine the Neo-Cons have been pursuing for the past eight years; if you're interested in beginning the process of rebuilding the U.S. into the better version of itself that we know it can be - if all that sounds like a better direction to you, Vote Obama/Biden.
The other party, led by Grampy McSame and Caribou Barbie (surely the weakest Republican't ticket since Harding/Coolidge in 1920) has certainly shown itself to be the party of More: eight More years of More fear, More help for the very wealthy and the corporate behemoths, More hypocrisy, More ignorance, More erosion of civil liberties, More religious intolerance . . . basically Bush II, only replacing Dick Vader with a beauty pageant runner-up.
You and I can make all the difference in the world by making a choice next week.
Mighty Mugg Obama sez: "DON'T FORGET TO VOTE!"

Marvel Janken

Holy Crap! Two posts in the same month! Will wonders never cease?
This is a piece I did for my pal Mike, for his Hitote project on DeviantArt.
http://hitoteproject.deviantart.com/
Mike is a phenomenally talented concept artist and all around CoolGuy, constantly enveloped in a cloud of swirling awesomeness. Check out his main DeviantArt page and tell me I'm not right: http://zatransis.deviantart.com/
My contribution is what a game of "Rock/Paper/Scissors" might look like in the Marvel Universe. After doing lots of Googley research on Kanji, I am hoping against hope that I got that part right. Boy would my face be red if I had mistakenly used the symbols for something close but no cigar like "Rocket, Pay-Per-View & Scissor Sisters" or something totally random like "Dandelion, Lipstick & Mickey Mantle" or "Bacon Lettuce & Tomato" or ""Moe Larry & Curly". I worry, you know.

Captain Tomorrow!

Captain Tomorrow was a character I created back in the late 80's for a project called Radio Shorts, along with my good friends Wes and Kyle. It was a half hour comedy/satire pastiche that was broadcast on San Francisco's KUSF for a while. Captain Tomorrow was a satire of a 1940's radio show featuring a time traveling adventurer from the "far flung future year of 1974!" Captain Tomorrow would journey back in time to help his little chums Tommy and Sally Miller battle Axis spies, all thanks to the magic of "Vacuum Tube Technology!"
At any rate, soon you can once again thrill to the adventures of Captain Tomorrow as well as a host of other wonderfully funny and subversive bits from Radio Shorts by virtue of the soon-to-be-completed Radio Shorts site, address soon to follow.
This is a logo illustration I did for Wes to help gussy up the website.

Not the same old jazz

My buddy Shawn poked and nudged and cajoled, and now that my Fall class is done I have a bit more time to mess about again - AND SO - here's some new-ish sketchbook/Photoshop messing about. I think that's Hoagy Carmichael tickling the ivories, but I don't remember who the songbird is. Thanks for the elbow, Shawn!

Nostalgic for Nixon

It seems like every day these criminal knuckleheads in the White House perpetrate some new appalling assault on the Constitution and our civil liberties.
Not to mention running up a leviathan of a budget deficit.
Not to mention carelessly presiding over these miserable adventures of futility in Iraq and Afghanistan, seemingly quite unperturbed by the daily deaths of scores of young American men and women as well as uncounted Iraqi civilians.
Not to mention continuing to reward the mostest wealthiest in our country with tax cuts while doing everything in their considerable power to demolish the middle class.
And on and on. It makes me almost nostalgic for the halcyon days of my youth when the crooks in the White House were like charming cultured amateurs compared to the current cabal. It makes me pine for the days of Nixon.
In retrospect, the antics of Nixon and his posse were like a Don Knotts/Tim Conway movie compared to the Bush, Vader-Cheney and their stormtroopers, or Morlocks, or Cylons, or (insert your evil minion symbols of choice here).
And when I get nostalgic, I go to both my Big Book of Presidents and my sketchbook and just start drawing the Nixon. It soothes me somehow, makes me think that maybe possibly there'll be some satisfactory end to what the Bush Mob is doing to our formerly great country. Because we did finally bring the power drunk Nixon and his merry crew of Constitution tramplers down, maybe we can do it again.
Who'd a thunk it: Nixon gives me hope.

Ill.Fri. - Citrus

The stunning view of the Citrus-74E system, which took 12 years to reach for the crew of the Starship Luddite. Sadly, no one on board was alive to witness it, as the entire crew had long ago perished due to scurvy.

Ill. Fri. - Neighbor

Two new movies - "Disturbia" and "Civic Duty" - are explorations into paranoia about who our neighbors are and, as Tom Waits sang: "What the hell is he doing in there?" They are of course modern takes on Hitchcock's "Rear Window", and I thought that might be an appropriate subject for the IllFri challenge this week.
For the most part I've always enjoyed watching "Rear Window", but there are so many aspects to it that I've always found so wierd and creepy, even for Hitchcock, that its not my favorite of his. (For what its worth, I'm partial to "North By Northwest", "Shadow Of A Doubt" and "Saboteur")
Wheelchair-bound Jimmy Stewart, with his big phallic telephoto lens, seems too old and entirely too cranky for the luminous, if a bit icy, Grace Kelly. His obsessive spying on his neighbors - a thoroughly recognizable human frailty though it may be - has always felt to me like it crosses a certain line of believability. It certainly makes Stewart's character less appealing, and the relentlessness of it it actually makes one a little sorry for poor, beleagured, lumbering Raymond Burr, as the killer Thorvald. He's loathsome, yes, but I can also understand his desire to just be left alone.
As for slimy character definition, I think the most successful scene in the movie is where Jimmy Stewart's character is watching his girlfriend getting strangled by Thorvald and he seems more worried about being found out as a peeping Tom than he is for her safety. Hitchcock and Stewart got that part creepily pitch perfect. It all makes you wanna close the curtains a bit tighter.

Ill. Fri. - Remember

Elephants are supposed to have phenomenal memories, but you'd never know it with the recent parade of pachyderms up to testify on Capitol Hill. Is it true that an elephant never forgets? "I don't recall."

Ill Fri: Polar

If global warming continues unabated, I imagine it'll be a much larger inconvenience for our little Happy Footed black and white pals down Antarctica way. What do you mean there isn't actually a big "South" pole there? I know I've seen pictures of it, and I'm pretty sure Bugs and Daffy will coroborate that.
Inspired by the art at such cool sites as http://www.pixeljoint.com/ and http://www.kennethfejer.com/isocity/ and http://www.x-panded.com/pixeldam/indexpixelmoon.html, I thought I'd try my hand at some pixel art. I used to do this back in the early 90's for Super Nintendo games, but haven't thought of it as an art form until seeing the work of artists like EBoy and Ill Fri contributor sosiukwan - http://sosiukwan.blogspot.com/. So here's my own amateurish, humble effort.
BTW: Clicking on the image won't make it all that much bigger, which is good, cuz it's meant to be viewed tiny.

Ill. Fri. - Fortune

Or rather, Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck and good fortune. Drifting in the cosmic currents, working her wheel to determine who gets a healthy crop, who gets the plague, and who wins "Project Runway".

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1922 – 2007

What sad news that Kurt Vonnegut died this week. He was truly one of the great American writers, often likened to Mark Twain - a brilliant humorist with a dark soul. He was a huge inspiration for me for a number of reasons. His easy-going, conversational style of prose came off as so relaxed, so off-handed, that it made me feel as if I could be a writer as well. Not that I am yet - obviously I’m still working on it - but his work sort of gave me permission to write things the way I felt they should be written.
Reading his novels also helped me make the transition between a steady diet of Science Fiction (almost to the exclusion of all other forms of fiction) into the world of More Serious Literature. I loved Cat’s Cradle for its sci-fi elements, but it also heightened my awareness of the absurdity of religion and the buffoonery of politics. Slapstick only further cemented my awe of his skills as a social satirist and even as a cultural surrealist, with its vivid imagery of a New York City in decay and miniaturized Chinese.
Even though his books had a deep cynicism, even fatalism at their core, they were always leavened with a hilarious absurdity. Breakfast of Champions, a tale of varying levels of failure and madness, was also wonderfully funny – it occurred to me at one point as I was rereading it a few years ago that the audio book would work well if narrated by Eeyore.
It’s a consolation of his passing that the news may spur people who’ve never read any of his great body of work to try one or two. For me, the melancholy is mixed with pleasant memories, causing me to dust off and reread the works of his I love the most, and expand to a few of the works I haven’t yet enjoyed.

Ill. Fri.: GREEN

As long as I've been semi-aware, "green" has always been slang for money. Now I'm admittedly not always the brighest star in the firmament, so it took me awhile to realize that our currency, our money, our "green", is not really green any more. In an effort to foil nefarious counterfitters, (as well, I suspect, as to make sure those pesky Euros don't outshine us in the money design department) our Treasury Dept. has been tarting up our foldin' money for the past few years. As a public service, and just to help familiarize you with the particulars of the new designs, here's a diagram, with helpful callouts, of the new $10 bill. Note that the government is doing their best to keep costs down by selling ad space on the bills, (not unlike the practice of professional sports team owners selling naming rights to their stadiums) such as the trademark web border design commemorating the upcoming release of Spider Man 3. "Green" no more.

Ill. Fri. - Snap

The very last sound you want to make when you're out hunting dragons.

Fun with Batman

I'm a big Batman geek. I love the mythology about him and his origin; I love all his gadgets, the more outrageous the better; the brilliance of his scientific and dectective abilities; and the fact that he's a self-made man,(except for the fact that he inherited millions from his industrialist father) in terms of his physical prowess - I've been a fan since I was a kid.
It seems like every other page in my sketchbook has some goofy Batman drawing on it, so I thought I'd share a few of them.

Ill. Fri. - I Spy

It just feels like someone's always out there, listening bugging tapping monitoring and yes, watching. Hello Patriot Act, Goodbye Civil liberties!

Ill. Fri. - Total

Since the Britney saga seems inescapable no matter where you look or how you try to avert your eyes, I gave in. I kept thinking: Total mess . . . Total train wreck . . . Total meltdown . . . or maybe Total schadenfreude. At any rate, its total something . . . hmmm, perhaps Total cultural bankruptcy . . .?

Ill. Fri. - Wired

Being sick all last week gave me the opportunity to reaquaint myself with a few favorite books, like Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy; Jon Stewart's America The Book, and the Leslie Cabarga collection of Progressive German Graphics. (I was woozy, and chose completely at random . . ) So I think I had a hankerin' to do a logo for a German coffee seller, set in 2007, either that or this is the long forgotten Dick Tracy villain Spiral Eyed Goatee Face. Twas coffee made me well again!

NEW DESIGN at SEE RED!

Please, when you get a minute, go to http://www.cafepress.com/seered and check out my latest design! If, like me, you're a big time coffee drinker, this may just be the design you need. I suppose I could also call this "Even Robots Get the Jitters" - possibly too much of a good thing. I know whenever I see a robot drinking a big ol' Venti of Electro Jolt Java, I give him a wide berth . . .