Author: Dan

Mailbag: ant facts

Reader JS chimes in on Krafty’s Ant Domination post:

I think that posts devoted to social insects should be a regular feature of your blog. Recently my mind has ranged widely on the possibility of practical jokes that could be played on these serious minded and humorless species. Dead ants exude a phermone alerts their fellows to the fact that they are dead, and upon receiving this chemical message the other ants grab the dead ant and hustle it out of the nest, where it is thrown onto a pile of misc. detritus. The top ant scientists have discovered that if they paint live ants with the phermone, they are perceived as “dead” and tossed out of the premises notwithstanding their vigorous  struggles to resist. The droll upshot of this situation – paint every member of the ant colony with the phermone and watch them whale on each other. Comic mistaken identity and broad physical comedy would be raised to a very high power in this “mirthquake” at the microscopic level.

Also, in a recent issue of the NYTimes tuesday science section, there was an article about a woman scientist who has developed a technique to identify and monitor individual ants. She discovered that at any given time, a significant fraction of ants are goofing off, and that most ants are not very good at their jobs. Most of the effective work is done by a small minority of ants.

Who knew? Finally, the ants-as-interchangeable-drones meme is debunked.

Hooray For Everything

Readers my age and older will probably remember the mercilessly schmaltzy clean-cut stylings of a musical outfit called Up With People from the Superbowl half-time shows of our youth. In case you’ve forgotten, here’s a hair-raising visual reminder:

up-with-people

Video footage of their 1982 halftime performance is here. It’s basically totalitarian kitsch personified.

In time, Up With People was appropriately satirized by The Simpsons, who introduced a fictitious musical outfit of wholesome go-getters called ‘Hooray For Everything’. In retrospect, this seems to be of a piece with the show’s scorched-earth fight with then-president George H. W. Bush. Bush, who in fact had Up With People perform at his inauguration, announced his intention to make American families ‘more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons’. The Simpsons responded by basically lampooning him to high hell, first through several clever sneak-attacks and through then an entire episode after he was voted out of office in what was probably the most unwatchable Simpsons installment ever:

simpsons_two_bad_neighbors

What I only learned recently, via Rick Pearlstein’s Nixonland, is that Up With People was not just some random schmaltzy irrelevancy but in fact a significant cultural artifact from the Vietnam era. Conservative youth groups, outraged at the media attention paid to war protesters, founded Up With People to provide a counterpoint. ‘If we’re going to debunk the myth of a soft, indulgent, arrogant American and show the world that we care about tomorrow, we’ve got to sing out our convictions, loud and strong,’ said a Republican organizer in 1966. In 1965, Up With People made their debut at a World’ Fair, emceeded by none other than Pat Boone (shown here in his later leather incarnation that earned him reprobation from his Christianist following:)

SAPA970129175420

What’s amazing in retrospect is that, given their partisan origins, Up With People were granted the largest media platform in American culture- the Superbowl half-time show- well into the 1980s. Looking through their bio, it seems that the Bush Sr. inauguration moment was (thankfully) their last moment of cultural relevancy, after which they were doomed to a circuit of country fairs and dorky Cold War-era feelgood diplomacy missions.

Incidentally, Nixonland is also indispensable at bringing to life the 60s origins of another 80s icon, Ronald Reagan. “You know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?” he gaffed, delightfully, in 1965. Then again, one must give him credit for his better lines: “He would tell young people harassing him with sings reading MAKE LOVE NOT WAR that the problem was that they looked incapable of doing either.” Credit where credit is due.

Why the short blog posts

0876853904.01.LZZZZZZZThere’s a chapter of Charles Bukowski’s Women that opens with this:

I began receiving letters from a girl in New York City. Her name was Mindy. She had run across a couple of my books, but the best thing about her letters was that she seldom …mentioned writing except to say that she was not a writer…
Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

I began receiving letters from a girl in New York City. Her name was Mindy. She had run across a couple of my books, but the best thing about her letters was that she seldom mentioned writing except to say that she was not a writer.

[…]

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

Maybe this is especially true nowadays with email. Email is closer to the exact mid-point between conversation and writing than traditional letter-writing in my experience (writing a letter by hand always seemed to morph into a labored literary exercise for me, despite my efforts to keep it light and conversational). At its best moments, email can produce a kind of resonance that’s rarely present in conversation and entirely absent from the labored writing of those of us who are not good writers.

I find that with any creative undertaking – be it writing, design, or something else entirely – the key is in finding a context that removes this weighty sense of trying, the self-consciousness that makes the process labored and ultimately un-fun. I had a drawing teacher who, for the first five weeks or so of the course, would only allow you to draw for 10 or 20 seconds at a time before stopping you. His intent was to isolate the initial sense of possibility and fun that exists in the first few moments of drawing before the labored feeling of “Oh no, I’m creating a drawing… what should I do next?” quickly kicks in. His idea was that once you’re able to isolate this first sensation from the second, hopefully you’re gradually able to carry it further into the process and delay the onset of the second. I think he was definitely onto something, although his manner of teaching it was admittedly frustrating at first.

Guns and books

cuba1

Another interesting ‘micro-climate’ of poster design was in Cuba. As was the case in Poland, there was a strong national idiom and an elevated regard for the poster compared to more industrialized parts of the world. Unlike Poland, though, where poster art was nationalized and state-run, the Cuban posters were more of an agi-prop, do-it-yourself proposition.

Two interesting motifs that appear a lot: guns and books. Artists seems to find an inexhaustible supply of imaginative presentations for the former in particular. I would never have imagined that a poster featuring a sunset composed of receding rifles in romantic hues would fly, but there it is. Also, the gun-plus-book-together image is pretty striking in terms of how visually logical the partnership seems in retrospect. Finally, just for fun, here’s a poster likening the lot of the Cuban farm worker with her Vietnamese commie brethren– very striking contrast between black-and-white vs. color that, again, would seem difficult to pull off in concept but works very naturally here.

cubas

Top: Rene Mederos. Bottom, left to right: Arturo Alfonso Palomino, Fausino Perez, and Mederos again.

Images taken from ¡Revolucion! Cuban Poster Art by Lincoln Cushing– more images and ordering info here.

Polish movie posters

poster2

On the heels of Krafty’s Polish Blues Brothers poster acquisition, I thought I’d write a bit on the genre at large. Poland has had a really unique relationship with poster design. The country emerged so devastated from WWII that it took much longer for TV and other communication technologies to make serious inroads, so the poster maintained this weirdly elevated status through the 60s, 70s and 80s. Poland formalized poster design to unusual degree (poster designers were taught in rigorous university programs, then went on to work in unions and accept state-controlled flow of jobs) and embraced it as a kind of national idiom. Polish posters tended to go in for a cheery, folkloric look in the 60s but then developed into something entirely different in the 70s and 80s as a strange, melancholic introspective style evolved.

There’s a lot to like about Polish film posters. For one, simply the fact that artists were allowed to work in this idiosyncratic, gloomy style while promoting films and not railroaded into some kind of generically upbeat, promotional mode. Second, the highly personalized interpretations of film themes (sometimes, you wonder if the designer had even seen the film or was merely working from a synopsis). Mostly, the fact that technological limitations freed designers from having to maintain a slavish realism in their approach. The production means weren’t available to reproduce stills from the movie at high quality, so it was sort of taken for granted that the designer’s solution would involve a certain amount of creative latitude. Sometimes, the technical limitations were turned on their head and used for effect, as in the Zloto Alaski poster where the black-and-white halftone pattern is made so big that you see it as a weird deliberate texture. Finally, in a state-controlled industry, nobody needed to promote themselves, so you don’t have that requirement that every damn person involved in the movie has to be listed along the bottom of the poster in type so condensed that no one can read it anyway.

There are too many good examples of Polish poster work to just select a few, so I limited myself to posters of American westerns.

posters

Top: Midnight Cowboy, Waldemar Swierzy

Bottom, clockwise: Pat Garret & Billy the Kid, Mieczcyslaw Wasilewski; North To Alaska, Jolanta Karczewska; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Waldemar Swierzy

Blue-some buddies

buddies

After reading Krafty’s Blues Brothers post a second time, I now realize he didn’t mean to say that there are thematic similarities between The Blues Brothers and Star Wars (just that both are highly imitated)… but this is how I took it on first reading, and it got me thinking:

  1. Land Cruiser = Blues Mobile
  2. Rowdy alien bar = rowdy redneck country/western bar
  3. Death Star = IRS building
  4. Alec Guiness = Ray Charles
  5. Carrie Fisher = Carrie Fisher
  6. There’s something to this!

Where it becomes a stretch is when you try to draw parallels between main male characters: Jake and Elwood are the consummate partners, whereas Han Solo and Luke have a very different ‘upstart vs. wily veteran’ rivalry that powers much of the Star Wars plot. Then it hit me that Jake and Elwood are really more like C3P0 and R2D2: inseparable buddies who are with us from the movie’s opening scene and loyally adhere to a single mission while other plot arcs and characters with more compromised motives swirl around them. Even the body types are identical, with each group having a more moderate tall/thin member and a more impetuous short/fat member.

(Incidentally, this kind of analogizing was done to much better effect by some genius on youtube, who pointed out the underlying similarities between Star Wars and Magnum P.I. opening credits.)

On a slightly more serious and hopefully more insightful note: Krafty poses an interesting point about why the movie felt so seminal at the time (aside from our age and its R rating). I think it featured two key elements of 80s movie-making that were just coming into focus:

1.  Cutting, dark humor. I heard an interview once where someone claimed that the National Lampoon ushered in a new era of American humor with Animal House (which Belushi of course starred in) whose touchstone was no longer Jewish humor (characterized by ‘What a fool am I!’-type jokes) but rather more biting English and Irish traditions of humor (‘What a fool you are’). While The Blues Brothers wasn’t as dark or cutting as, say, Monty Python or even Animal House, there’s a gleeful kind of absurd and unexplained quality to a lot of the jokes that seems to come from the same place as David Letterman dropping refrigerators off buildings and making a musical beat out of it on his show around the same time. In other words, while the humor itself isn’t necessarily dark, the willful disregard for clearly-explained jokes seems to come from that same contemptuous, cynical place.

2. The being-cool and rocking-out factor. The Blues Brothers were simply cool, and while their coolness was on display throughout the movie, the musical scenes where they would sing cool R&B songs and do flips and stuff was the cudgel with which their coolness was impressed on the viewer. I can’t think of any movies before 1978 where you were simply invited to enjoy someone singing and being cool in the middle of a movie, but starting in the 80s, it becomes a staple: Tom Cruise rocking out in his underwear in Risky Business, the infamous Van Halen air guitar hamburger scene in Better Off Dead, Ferris Bueller performing Twist and Shout to the entire city of Chicago, etc. I’d never thought about it before, but I’m sure the watershed moment for this trope must have been Grease in 1978, which, by dint of being a musical, had Travolta suddenly being cool and and rocking out in all kinds of contexts. Movie execs must have realized the potential in this and started writing it into movies without worrying about how incongruous air-guitaring hamburgers might seem to future generations.

Bubbles

I had a belated concern over Michael Jackson’s death: what of Bubbles, the singer’s erstwhile chimpanzee companion, reportedly the only moonwalking ape on earth with his own bodyguard ? I asked a few people what they thought was going to happen to Bubbles when they brought up the death of his master over the past week. Answers were unsatisfactory, ranging from “Who?” to my hairdresser who dismissively said, “I don’t know… he’s old now.” I finally looked into the matter and learned that apparently Bubbles hasn’t been on the scene for a long time, as The King of Pop had him shipped out to a monkey preserve once the chimp started exhibiting aggressive behaviors and posing a menace to Jackson’s son. Oh. That’s sad. I prefer to think of MJ and Bubbles as they were immortalized by Jeff Koons, seemingly eternally inseparable:

koons-michael-jackson-and-bubbles-1988

Suggestion box

20090118063827!Marge_SimpsonThis is a proud week for the blog, as one loyal reader submitted the following comment to the What Is Mock Duck? page:

Hi Dan:
This is from YOUR MOM: I sure do enjoy your odd sense of humor! I think that you should give some detail on the other writers, tell us a little about them and why you selected them. Love, Mom.

So there you have it: my mom thinks my blog is cool. Take that, would-be detractors.

Anyway, to answer her point, I’ve prodded our guest blogger (we’re down to one currently) to provide some more info about himself for our hungry readership.

Mysteries of Czech language

mcescher2Another probing look at the third-most spoken language in Texas (well, not anymore, but it used to be for much of the 20th century). Previous installments here and here.

Only one of the following statements is false:

In Czech…

  1. “No” means yes
  2. “Yes” means eat!, but only as an imperative
  3. “Host” means guest
  4. Pants are worn over one’s arms and shirts over one’s legs