Played a show at the Music Room with Erin Costelo last Saturday.
Recorded some more with Al Tuck.
Finished Alan Watts' The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. I'd read it as a teenager, but forgotten how inciteful it is. Probably one of the more influential books in shaping my life. Probably could have just read it over and over instead of a lot of the various metaphysical stuff I've read since.Lately I'm obsessed with Nancy comics.
Worked myself into a literally nightmarish state over a used car sale print ad that over two weeks became so cluttered with junky visuals and starbursty exclamations there's no communicative architecture whatsoever, let alone hierarchy of meaning. In my dream the ad is the surface of a pond under which I'm drowning as there are no spaces where I might come up for air.
Realized that some people probably couldn't see the animated GIF I'd put on the last post, and must have wondered what all the fuss was over an admittedly Escherian but quite lifeless cube in a cube drawing. Well you'll just have to trust me that your mind would be verily blown if you could see the way it perpetually turns itself inside out and outside in. Seriously, dude. If Escher were alive today, he'd be working in animation. Or Lego®.
Currently reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, wherein Marco Polo describes the cities he's seen to Kubla Khan, whose domain they ostensibly comprise. Only it becomes apparent that the cities being described are fictitious and all based on Venice. Each description is only a page or two, some banal but poetic, and some quite fantastic. Calvino uses the format as an excuse to spout off about human nature. It's fascinating.
Softball playoffs are this weekend, starting at 8:00 in the morning on Saturday. Ah hope we wee-uhn!
- Andrew
3 comments:
That Lego piece just blew my sweet mind!
You never said why you were obsessed with Nancy comics. I used to like them and have a few in my comic box.
Mum
Scott McCloud, author of the excellent Understanding Comics, sums it up best in his explanation of the game 5-card Nancy, which he invented:
'Ernie Bushmiller's comic strip "Nancy" is a landmark achievement: A Comic so simply drawn it can be reduced to the size of a postage stamp and still be legible; an approach so formulaic as to become the very definition of the "gag-strip"; a sense of humor so obscure, so mute, so without malice as to allow faithful readers to march through whole decades of art and story without ever once cracking a smile.
Nancy is Plato's playground. Ernie Bushmiller didn't draw A tree, A house, A car. Oh, no. Ernie Bushmiller drew THE tree, THE house, THE car. Much has been made of the "three rocks." Art Spiegelman explains how a drawing of three rocks in a background scene was Ernie's way of showing us there were some rocks in the background. It was always three. Why? Because two rocks wouldn't be "some rocks." Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. And four rocks was unacceptable because four rocks would indicate "some rocks" BUT IT WOULD BE ONE ROCK MORE THAN WAS NECESSARY TO CONVEY THE IDEA OF "SOME ROCKS."'
The iconography is also, for me, one of those weird phenomena that perfectly balance the exoticism of fuzzy nostalgia with instantaneous recognition. But mostly I just find it really cute.
- Andrew
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