December 2005 Archives
"When I listen to music, I want to hear a person and a person that I trust. I don't want to hear the sound of a culture..."
-David Berman
I am not Jewish. I was brought up a light and liberal Catholic. As a teen I remember almost wishing I was a Jew. I guess I saw it as a culturally rich, underdog ritual... kind of like punk music but with cultural richness. I didn't know if my culture was a culture and I saw this as a bad thing.
For Christmas, I was going to give myself a portrait of David Berman but I couldn't find an online image good enough to render fully (there he is in caricature form below the Menorah). I've been into his music and poetry very much lately. Even his drawings have a great clumsy kind of truth to them... like an American David Shrigley.
Other Jews featured above:
Celluloid Loyd, owner of a video rental called "Watch This" in downtown Portland.
We share coffee and smokes after work sometimes. He has a great sense of humor and knows his movies well. If you shop at his store, don't call him Celluloid Loyd.
On the bottom left is Franz Kafka. Last night I read an old national geographic article from the seventies called "Six Months Alone in a Cave". The author, Michel Siffre, spent six months sealed in a Texas cave (one-hundred feet under ground) to study the internal rhythms of humans when all calendars, clocks, and daylight are removed. The experience did not go well for him. About three months into it, he panicked, certain that he had inhaled the evaporated urine of rabies infected bats. I did not know that rabies could be transmitted this way, but it can. Reading this, I couldn't help thinking about Kafka's "The Burrow". Though Siffre's account is more of a "fish out of water" tale, both stories share a certain panicked ego and a fear of time wasted. Something I can relate to.
On the top is Mathieu Schneider. All time leading Jewish scorer in NHL history.
I guess this drawing was going to be a cheap sort of tribute to some interesting Jews, for the $5 or less gift pile of our Christmas/Chanukah wine-athon. I must disclaim that the inclusion of the plug-in Menorah and Jewish wine is maybe even too garish for me. Oh well. I'll give it to my buddy Adam (you know, as a joke) and throw some red and green lighters on the pile.
Happy Holidays...
*** molested in photoshop oh hell.
Here are some stills from two animations that Daniel and I made for the Take it EZ show tonight at the Guild Theater. Dave H and the Titan space probe on the sound. 7:00 pm
The top image is a t-shirt illustration that never went anywhere and the rest are recent sketchbook like drawings, though they are not in any sort of book. There was a time when I kept a regular sketchbook. Technology has changed all that. Now every thing is done on loose, scannable pieces of paper that are easily lost or ruined. Also, many are changed in photoshop.
I resisted computers, emails, and even the internet for years with what can only be described as willful ignorance. I fancied myself a purist though I often found more "primitive" ways to cheat my way through an image. It would be nice to be able to say that the computer is just another tool in the shed but it really has started to dominate the way I approach anything that I might think about posting here. The loss of sketchbooks is getting me down. It might be time to take a break from using photoshop for anything other than cropping and cleaning. humbug.