Someone's Angel Today

"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers." – James Baldwin

Arts Education Eminently Practical

Yes, a university liberal arts education is so useless, I'm sure the rich will stop sending their children to get them at expensive private schools. Or is it only the working class and the middle class who are supposed to remain ignorant of the finer things in life?

Visiting an Art Guru

Art and the State of Wonder

“I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” 

— Glenn Gould

The Gent Takes Off

The Gentleman Analyst exits his Observatory of All Things. And I observe that AI art is a hoot.

Maigret's Prose

“The memories reached him in waves, because this was another year when spring was early, and that morning he had left home without his overcoat. He felt as light as the sparkling air. The colors of the shops, the food stalls, the women’s dresses were all bright and cheerful.

“He was not thinking of anything in particular, just a few disconnected little thoughts.”

— Georges Simenon, Maigret’s Pickpocket

I always enjoy the quotidian aspects of the Maigret novels — the specificity of weather, the satisfaction of meals, the small vivid impressions — as much as I do the crime stories. He’s one of those characters who wanders around in your mind, knocking out his pipe, after the story ends.

A Reassuring Glow

The soft yellow cones

of the streetlights in the haze

welcome weary eyes.

A.I.? Aye Yi Yi Yi!

AI art is attracting a lot of bitter Luddite invective these days. 

But I calmly reply that all artists borrow elements of other artists’ styles, particularly when they’re developing. So let’s not get all high dudgeon about AI here.

I have used AI to generate thematic sample comic book images. And it’s a funny thing, as Stan Lee used to say. The reaction to one of my AI images was instructive. 

People asked, “Where’d you get that wonderful image?” 

And when I answered “AI,” several of them immediately replied, “Oh yuck, it’s awful!”

Literally, they’ve said this! Their hypocrisy was instantaneous.

Remember, the comic book industry was built on artistic swipes. 

And style cannot be copyrighted. 

“It’s not always bad,” observed my comics historian friend Joseph Lenius. “Al Williamson was a genius, and he obviously followed in the footsteps of Alex Raymond. (Frank) Frazetta as a comic book artist did so to an extent from (Hal) Foster. MANY have tried to follow in the footsteps of Wally Wood (who borrowed from others and constantly swiped), although few have succeeded.”

Also, there are literally hundreds of thousands of public domain comic book images which can be sampled by AI. 

“AI using that is no worse than a person doing the same,” Lenius remarked. “Again, there are a lot out there who think NOTHING bad about artists swiping, tracing, light-boxing.”

AI’s art’s detractors decry it as “lazy” and “soulless.” 

That’s claptrap.

I’d say it’s the detractors’ hysterical knee-jerk Luddite reactions that are intellectually lazy. And as for “soulless,” well, are blueprints “soulless?” 

AI art is a tool that enables you to visually describe your concepts — swiftly, helpfully and very effectively. 

So let’s just leave the “souls” out of it entirely, shall we?

Experiencing the Autotelic

“The term autotelic derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is not done with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward. 

“Playing the stock market in order to make money is not an autotelic experience; but playing it in order to prove one’s skill at forecasting future trends is — even though the outcome in terms of dollars and sense is exactly the same. 

“Teaching children in order to turn them into good citizens is not autotelic, whereas teaching them because one enjoys interacting with children is. 

“What transpires in the two situations is ostensibly identical; what differs is that when the experience is autotelic, the person is paying attention to the activity for its own sake; when it is not, the attention is focused on the consequences.”

— Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“Csíkszentmihályi interviewed artists and musicians in order to understand what flow felt like,” Robert Genn noted. “Their reports — 7000 of them — were staggeringly similar: each described a feeling of total immersion and intrinsic enjoyment, a loss of a sense of time and other needs, and an almost out-of-body experience, where the activity was automatic, without much conscious effort. Think of a clarinetist observing her own fingers, letting the instrument play itself.

“The most important thing about flow is that it only happens when a person is nestled in a psychological state between challenge and control; immersed in an activity with which she already possesses a fair amount of skill and evolved technique. One cannot lose herself in a concerto, after all, until she has long practiced her scales.”

Csíkszentmihályi noted, “Some things we are initially forced to do against our will turn out in the course of time to be intrinsically rewarding.”

Wabi-sabi: A Way to Look at the World

Wabi-sabi: seeing beauty in what is weathered and impermanent, in conditions beyond conventional symmetry. It’s an ancient aesthetic rooted in Zen Buddhism.

Finding the Freedom of Flow

Flow: “The state of concentration and engagement that can be achieved when completing a task that challenges one's skills. The theory was formulated when Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed dozens of experts, from composers and artists to tradesmen and chefs.”

In his book Awakening Your Ikigai, Ken Mogi wrote, “Csikszentmihalyi testifies that one source of inspiration for his  work on flow came when he observed a painter friend working on his artwork for hours on end, without any prospect of selling the work or getting financial reward for it. This particular state of mind, or work ethic, where you just immerse yourself in the joy of being in the her and now, without asking for immediate reward or recognition, is an integral part of the Japanese concept of Ikigai.”

“Ikigai” is a Japanese word that translates as a raison d'être, a reason to get up in the morning.

Something That Will Never Let Us Down

“Always probing and rejecting, and this constant dedication to perfection, to the principle of inevitability,” Leonard Bernstein said. “(The composer) will give away his life and his energies just to make sure that one note follows another with complete inevitability.

“It seems rather an odd way to spend one’s life, but it isn’t so odd when we think that the composer, by doing this, leaves us at the finish with a feeling that something is right in the world, that checks throughout. Something that follows its own law consistently. Something we can trust, that will never let us down.”

Frank Lloyd Wright on American Wrongs

Frank Lloyd Wright’s sumac window, 1902,
Dana-Thomas House, Springfield, Illinois. 

By the dawn of the 20^th century, architect Frank Lloyd Wright had discovered something I didn’t learn until the 21^st century — that kleptocapitalism must finally and necessarily destroy the standards of every profession with which it comes in contact.

In his 1900 speech to the Architectural League of America in Chicago, titled The Architect, Wright “…reminded his colleagues that in this country commerce had triumphed over art,” wrote Robert C. Twombly in his book Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture. “The lust for money had reduced the architect to a servant of the business community.”

Wright charged that the American architect “…panders to silly women his silly artistic sweets,” trading experimentation and individuality for financial security.

“(The architect) now modeled commercial buildings after Greek temples and luxury homes after Louis XIV palaces, all because the businessman and his wife ‘knew what they wanted,’” Twombly wrote. “No longer an independent spirit, the architect had become a salesman, peddling prepackaged ‘styles’ from the files of huge ‘plan-factories.’

“At the height of the industrial revolution in America, Wright was painfully aware that the new corporate elite had usurped the status of the professional, reducing him to an employee at its beck and call.”

In 21^st century capitalism-gone-wild America, that sad state of professional degradation applies not just to architects but to physicians, educators, military officers, police officers, attorneys, journalists, you name it.

For pity’s sake, judges have been caught framing innocent American children because they’ve been bribed by private prison corporations to provide warm bodies in order to increase the corporation’s lucrative taxpayer subsidy.

Suspended Between the Depths and the Light

'The Swimming Hole' by Thomas Eakins (1884-85)

Poet Walt Whitman loved swimming with other young men, nude in the fashion of the 19^th century, their bodies electric.

Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,

The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,

The skin, the sun-burnt shade, freckles, hair,

The curious sympathy one feels, when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,

The circling rivers, the breath, and breathing it in and out…

“The young men ran dancing and laughing along the sand, bathed in the surf, fished, dug clams, speared messes of fat, sweet-meated eel,” wrote biographer Justin Kaplan. “He loved swimming, of a passive sort — ‘I was a first rate aquatic loafer,’ he recalled. ‘I possessed almost unlimited capacity for floating on my back.’ Cradled, rocked and drowsing, his body rolling ‘silently to and fro in the heave of the water,’ he lay suspended between the depths and the light, between the unconscious and the world of necessity.”

How to Succeed at Debating an Agnostic

In 1876, during a train journey, a former general and failed attorney named Lew Wallace was humiliated.

While debating religion with the famed agnostic author Robert G. Ingersoll, Wallace realized that he knew next to nothing about his own Christian faith.

Wallace devoted three years to studying the Bible and researching Christianity, and the result was an adventure novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which eventually outsold every book in the United States except the Bible.

I was fascinated to learn that the first dramatic adaptation of the story was not the silent film version, but a six-act, three-and-a-half-hour 1899 Broadway play which boasted spectacular lighting, large onstage crowds and, as biographer Andre Soares noted, “…two horse-drawn chariots darting at full speed on parallel treadmills, with a Circus Maximus backdrop revolving behind them.” Half a million people saw the play on Broadway, and more than 20 million saw it on tour throughout the world.

Burgess Meredith: From the Bard to the Bird

Lee Meriwether as the Catwoman with Meredith as the Penguin in the 1966 Batman movie.

The TV Batman villains of the mid-1960s were terrific — zany, manic anarchists who were almost understandably ready to rain knockout gas and colorful chaos on the ridiculously strait-laced citizens of Gotham City.

The best of the lot, to my mind, was Burgess Meredith as the Penguin, played with a lusty twinkle in the eye, anserous verbal tics and a general air of evil glee.

“Ah, yes, the villainous Penguin. It pursues me,” the celebrated actor reported in his 1994 biography, So Far, So Good. “It was a deliberately overblown approach. It may have done me more harm than good, but it made an impact. I thought it had a Dickensian quality — or a spoof of one. It was fun to act. I was only one of many villains, as you know. I had an elaborate makeup — a huge nose and a great, extended stomach. It was as complete a disguise as you could get, but people recognized me in it. The interesting thing about the Penguin was that I made only a few episodes, maybe nine or 10. And one feature film.

“It’s amazing how many people equate me with that one brief role. I still receive hundreds of requests for pictures. The recent feature picture Batman ignited reruns of the series. It never stops. Recently a newspaper qualified me as ‘best known as the Penguin.’ It really an idiot’s corner to get into”

Asked why he took the part in the first place, Meredith replied, “Well, everybody was taking parts in Batman — from Frank Sinatra to Otto Preminger, everyone. It was the trendy thing to do back then. The Penguin stuck to me because the character was vivid. There were probably 25 ‘lead villains,’ the Joker, the Catwoman and so on.

“When Eva Le Gallienne was presented with an award and I was one of the speakers, I told her the first part she had given me was that of the Duck in Alice in Wonderland, and I said I wanted to thank her because ‘it defined my career: I went from a Duck to a Penguin.’”

The young actor Jeff Bridges, thrilled to work with Meredith on a 1970 film, recalled seeing Meredith paste something up on the wall of his hotel room.

“I said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ And you said, ‘Look at this!’” It was an article from a Hong Kong newspaper about a man who had been raping people while impersonating the Penguin.” 

Reality reportedly intruded when he leaped off a building, opened his umbrella and went splat.

How to Become an Agent

To say that Jonathan Clowes had an unlikely background for a literary agent would be an understatement.

“He was born in 1930, left school at 15, became a Communist and was thrice imprisoned for refusing to do compulsory military service (with spells in Wormwood Scrubs, Wandsworth and Brixton prisons, where he read avidly, as he’d done in school),” wrote Zachary Leader in The Life of Kingsley Amis.

Clowes in 1970 (photo by Diane Cilento)

An autodidact, Clowes also spent two years homeless. “Clowes was wholly self-taught as an agent, which he became by accident, while working as a painter and decorator. A man on his crew, Henry Chapman, had written a play and Clowes managed to get it to (theatrical director) Joan Littlewood, whom he admired but had never met. Littlewood loved it and agreed to put it on, after which Clowes got another friend’s first novel published by Faber and Faber. He then found a third client, a graphic artist named Len Deighton, whose first novel, The Ipcress File, made them both a fortune.”

A 1970 profile in The Guardian noted, “When he began in 1960 with books by two friends of his — Fred Ball’s A Breath of Fresh Air and a play by Henry Chapman — Clowes had never seen a contract in his life, bluffed his way through every situation by staying silent and getting others to do all the talking, and had only heard of one publisher ‘which explains why Fabers took all my first books,’ he says.”

“It was with The Ipcress File that Clowes negotiated his first film deal,” Leader wrote. “The producer Harry Saltzman sent him an enormous, largely incomprehensible contract. Clowes sent it back three times, each time with the message: ‘this is totally unacceptable.’ By taking careful note of how the contract improved with each rejection, a process which took a year, Clowes learned how to negotiate a film deal.”

“Clowes stuck out for a good deal and got it, but the struggle became so intense during the year of negotiations that both parties fell ill,” the newspaper noted.

“I know I am alarming,” Clowes told the newspaper. “People never know what I’m thinking, but that is a distinct advantage.”

Clowes went on to become the agent for the novelists Kingsley Amis and his wife Jane Howard. When American publishers proved skittish about publishing Amis’ 1984 novel Stanley and the Women, which was perceived as “anti-woman,” Clowes turned an obstacle into a stepping stone. He contacted the New York Times and passed along news of the novel’s rejection as “a form of censorship.” The controversy not only got the novel published, but increased its sales.

“The qualities that make a good agent are a good business sense combined with an ability to help a writer aesthetically,” Clowes told the newspaper. “A lot of agents have one without the other.”  “Very few people know what an agent does,” Clowes once said. “I’ve had lots of people asking what I do and when I answer, ‘Sell the rights of books,’ they say, ‘Is that a full-time job?’”

The Heroes Who Save the Day in a Small Way

Everything about superheroes is gigantic, symbolically if not literally. They are colossal, displaying the strength of titans, flying across the landscape as if in seven-league boots, with stupendous endurance and a monumental dedication to justice and the protection of the innocent.

So the last quality you’d expect to associate with superheroes is … smallness. Yet at least three major superheroes have made it big through being tiny. That very counter-intuitiveness became part of their appeal.

Children, who are little and often pushed around by bigger people, turned to superhero comics to forget being small, to indulge in fantasies of freedom and power. Superheroes permitted them to transcend their condition, but the superheroes I’m talking about went one step further, and empowered them within their condition.

How do you turn weakness into strength, loom large while being tiny? Well, when you think about it, small targets are tough to hit. Small spies might as well be invisible. And the small may slip in where the large are barred.

The first such hero started early — in Quality’s Feature Comics 27 in 1939 — and didn’t end his run until 1953. The caped, blue-clad Doll Man, who used mental concentration to shrink to six inches while retaining his full strength, headlined Feature Comics and his own title. Like the similar later heroes, the adventures of Darrel Dane were kept interesting through semi-comical juxtapositions in size. He could ride a Great Dane like a horse, fly in a toy airplane or on an eagle, and even shrink his girlfriend to join him in his crusade as Doll Girl.

After Quality went out of business, the very longevity of the now-defunct character undoubtedly caught the interest of DC Comics and what would become Marvel Comics, once they got busy dusting off old superhero concepts for the space age.

In October 1961, in Showcase 34, DC debuted the Atom, a freshly stylized version of a Golden Age character who just been a short young guy with formidable and finally superhuman strength. But the new Atom, physicist Ray Palmer, owed more to Doll Man than he did to his namesake.

The Flash, DC’s first Silver Age superhero, was able to ring in many changes on the feats that could be accomplished with super speed, and the Atom did the same with his small stature. He could ride the wind by reducing his weight, use a telephone as an effective teleporter and shrink into subatomic worlds (where he could paradoxically appear as a giant).

In January 1962, Tales to Astonish 27 featured the spooky tale of Henry Pym, a biochemist who invented a shrinking formula and wound up trapped in an anthill. Barely escaping with his life, though the help of a friendly ant, Pym destroyed the formula — only to have to retrieve it eight issues later as Marvel shifted emphasis from monster stories to superhero tales.

Thus was born Ant-Man, who — like the Atom and Doll Man — could not only shrink and retain his strength, but also command ants like an army. Ant-Man followed Doll Man’s lead in acquiring a girlfriend who doubled as his superhero partner, the Wasp. The history of the big little superheroes has illustrated one of Stan Lee’s favorite principles in storytelling — the idea of turning a seeming disadvantage into an advantage for the character.

Robert Shaw: That Certain Teacher

 “I had one schoolmaster who got me to read all sorts of things — pretty well everything, including all the classic novels. He was just one of those bits of luck in one’s life. His name was Cyril Wilkes, and I still see him from time to time.

Actor Robert Shaw

“He must have been lonely, and that that was his life — teaching boys and helping them. He used to take three or four of us to see plays in London. The first real play I ever saw, in the autumn of 1944, was Hamlet, with John Gielgud, in a repertory production put on at the Haymarket. Mr. Wilkes took some of us to London during a school holiday. We saw Gielgud’s Hamlet at a matinee. That evening, we saw Margaret Leighton and Ralph Richardson in Peer Gynt, and the next day we saw Laurence Olivier in Richard III at a matinee, and Alastair Sim in the James Birdie play It Depends What You Mean that evening. The third day, we saw Laurence Olivier in the film Henry V in the morning, and in the evening we saw John Gielgud again, in Love for Love.

“I was quite dazzled. Gielgud made an extraordinary impression on me. I can see him now as he looked in Hamlet — that long, angular body in the black costume. That first night, I went back to the hotel room, picked up Hamlet, and read it from beginning to end.

“Me. Wilkes taught French and directed all the school plays. He always had time to talk to the boys. We used to sit in his room until two or three in the morning talking about books and politics. Mr. Wilkes was one of those English liberal of the thirties — a member of the Left Book Club, who probably thought about going to fight fascism in Spain but then hadn’t done it. He was that kind of teacher.

“He directed me in the school plays, but told me not to try to become a professional actor. He said that I had the wrong temperament for it — that I was too rebellious and wanted my own way too much. Later on, I found out that it was his policy to say that to everybody, on the theory that if you’re set on doing a thing, you’ll go ahead and do it anyway.” —  Robert Shaw, The Player: Profile of An Art

Broomsticks Over Broadway

One might think that being the most popular playwright in America, with hit after hit on stage and screen, would make one feel secure. And one would, of course, be wrong.

“I’d had an enormous run from 1961 through 1968, and I felt, if not quite on top of the world, at least that I was living on one of the higher floors,” Neil Simon recalled in his memoir Rewrites.

“But the thought was always there that they could take it away as fast as it came, a symptom all too familiar to almost everyone I knew or read about in show business who rose quickly to the top. In my insecurity I wondered when I would be accepted as having ‘arrived.’ And I constantly thought maybe one more play would do it. It never happens, of course. No shadowy figure appears in the middle of the night to deliver a letter that says, ‘You’ve arrived.’ Success is not something you can hold in your hand. Joan was something I could hold. And Ellen and Nancy — I could hold them.

Simon met one source of his insecurities outside Sardi’s one rainy night. “For as many people out there who applaud your work, there’re an equal number who dismiss it out of hand. I once met Pauline Kael, the former film critic for the New Yorker, who was held in very high esteem — except by anyone I ever spoke to. There was no denying she was a brilliant writer who seemed to prefer Polish or Czech films made on a budget of twelve dollars with stories somewhat on the lines of ‘How a Greek sailor wakes up on a beach one morning with a woman’s brown shoe in his pocket. The rest of the picture traces his search.’ Fortunately the picture invariably ends before you ever find out.

“That was Art. I didn’t write Art.

“We met one evening as we were leaving Sardi’s restaurant, where the New York Film Critics Awards were being handed out,” Simon said. “Ms. Kael and I were both standing under a canopy as the rain pelted New York, and I had very little sympathy for the fact that her new shoes were getting wet, since she had stepped on my own feet every time I had something to show the public.

“As we both waited silently for a cab, we glanced at each other, knowing someone had to say something first. She made a halfhearted attempt at a smile, and said, ‘I haven’t been awfully nice to you over the years, have I?’ I made a full-hearted attempt not to smile, and said, ‘No, you haven’t.’ She said, ‘Well, it’s hard not to knock you. You keep coming around too often.’ Then she got in her cab and quite surprisingly flew up into the night sky, as I thought I heard a cackle in the distance.”

Critics and playwrights can be both natural allies and natural enemies.

Maybe the trouble was something as simple as Kael’s nagging awareness that nobody needed her to explain to them that Simon’s films and plays were enjoyable.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that she thought she was paying Simon a compliment.