iPod - "Out of Batteries"
Art Spiegelman was really great. They set him up at the Court Theater (which happens to be right across from my dorm) so the setting was very Inside the Actor's Studio... except Spiegelman looks a lot more like Mr. Wade than James Lipton. He operated a slideshow from an iMac with his left hand and operated a cigarette in his right (he went through about 4 in the lecture). The lecture ended up being a short history of comics, which I think bored some of the audience who had come to hear about Maus, but it really jazzed me. A long time ago I used to be huge into old comic strips. I still have all these anthologies and encyclopedias that catalog "The Katzenjammer Kids" and "Little Nemo" and "Krazy Kat." I recognized almost all the slides that Spiegelman showed because of these books. Here's a few examples of Lyonel Feninger, a German cartoonist drawing in America. They're so fun to look at, from back in the day when there were comics that took up an entire page, a notion which should ring familiar with Bill Watterson fans. It made me want to pore over all those pages again, and as soon as I get home, I think I'm going to.
He closed with a few interesting remarks about recent movie adaptations of comic books: about how people will always congratulate "him" (or his medium) because of "Ghost World" and "American Splendor" and "Spider-Man" being adapted, and even about Kavalier & Clay for winning the Pulitzer. He finds this praise vaguely insulting to the medium, as if the only way that comics can be validated is by being re-directed into straight art or straight literature. I guess I can see that. It's apparent that "Road to Perdition" or "League of Extraordinary Gentleman" haven't really boosted the public's awareness and respect of graphic novels, it's just given Hollywood a new source of untapped material.
Incidentally (this is mostly for Adam), I think Spiegelman has a rather low opinion of superheroes. He referred to the genre briefly as "bankrupt." However, he did throw a bone to Watchmen which I'd like to read this summer and finally find out what everyone's been talking about.
On to classes. For the final Intro to Poetry paper I'm supposed to choose a poet and examine a poem in relation to his or her oeuvre, and I decided immediately that I was going to do Wallace Stevens and totally blow my professor out of the water with my reading of "Sunday Morning." Unfortunately, he spent two days of class close-reading the entire thing. So much for that. Now I might do "Thirteen Way of Looking at a Blackbird,"
which, let me tell you, is a wicked-crazy poem. You might even say that it's wickecrazy.
I followed some woman into the elevator at work today who works on the 2nd floor. Since she was closest to the buttons, she asked, "Three or Four?" I was mildly offended that she immediately presupposed on which floor I worked. Do I look like a 3 or 4? Was it my shoes? I had the distinct feeling that she was judging me. Are the people on the second floor so close that they can all smell an outsider? The way she said "Three of Four" was like she was saying, "You don't belong on Two. That's not even an option for you." Yeah, OK, I work on 4. But what if I did work on the second floor? Yeah. What if I did.
Blech. I have to go brush my teeth. This blog is boring.
Art Spiegelman was really great. They set him up at the Court Theater (which happens to be right across from my dorm) so the setting was very Inside the Actor's Studio... except Spiegelman looks a lot more like Mr. Wade than James Lipton. He operated a slideshow from an iMac with his left hand and operated a cigarette in his right (he went through about 4 in the lecture). The lecture ended up being a short history of comics, which I think bored some of the audience who had come to hear about Maus, but it really jazzed me. A long time ago I used to be huge into old comic strips. I still have all these anthologies and encyclopedias that catalog "The Katzenjammer Kids" and "Little Nemo" and "Krazy Kat." I recognized almost all the slides that Spiegelman showed because of these books. Here's a few examples of Lyonel Feninger, a German cartoonist drawing in America. They're so fun to look at, from back in the day when there were comics that took up an entire page, a notion which should ring familiar with Bill Watterson fans. It made me want to pore over all those pages again, and as soon as I get home, I think I'm going to.
He closed with a few interesting remarks about recent movie adaptations of comic books: about how people will always congratulate "him" (or his medium) because of "Ghost World" and "American Splendor" and "Spider-Man" being adapted, and even about Kavalier & Clay for winning the Pulitzer. He finds this praise vaguely insulting to the medium, as if the only way that comics can be validated is by being re-directed into straight art or straight literature. I guess I can see that. It's apparent that "Road to Perdition" or "League of Extraordinary Gentleman" haven't really boosted the public's awareness and respect of graphic novels, it's just given Hollywood a new source of untapped material.
Incidentally (this is mostly for Adam), I think Spiegelman has a rather low opinion of superheroes. He referred to the genre briefly as "bankrupt." However, he did throw a bone to Watchmen which I'd like to read this summer and finally find out what everyone's been talking about.
On to classes. For the final Intro to Poetry paper I'm supposed to choose a poet and examine a poem in relation to his or her oeuvre, and I decided immediately that I was going to do Wallace Stevens and totally blow my professor out of the water with my reading of "Sunday Morning." Unfortunately, he spent two days of class close-reading the entire thing. So much for that. Now I might do "Thirteen Way of Looking at a Blackbird,"
which, let me tell you, is a wicked-crazy poem. You might even say that it's wickecrazy.
I followed some woman into the elevator at work today who works on the 2nd floor. Since she was closest to the buttons, she asked, "Three or Four?" I was mildly offended that she immediately presupposed on which floor I worked. Do I look like a 3 or 4? Was it my shoes? I had the distinct feeling that she was judging me. Are the people on the second floor so close that they can all smell an outsider? The way she said "Three of Four" was like she was saying, "You don't belong on Two. That's not even an option for you." Yeah, OK, I work on 4. But what if I did work on the second floor? Yeah. What if I did.
Blech. I have to go brush my teeth. This blog is boring.
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