Jan. 29

Book Note

Jan. 27

Jan. 26

4 Links - January 25, 2015

bin crawler - Gets at one of the real pleasures of comics (and good comic book stores), the half-painful, half-amazing experience of going through comics bargain bins, wondering at the weirdness of everything, lost in browsing, scanning page after page, until your eye is seized by some amazing weird cover, panel, page, drawing, etc., something weird or transcendently weird or intense or funny or profound or all of it together. Who knows what else might be waiting in those boxes? There's much more weird amazing stuff on the internet, but of course it's not the same.

________________________________________

________________________________________

large photo of people playing music

________________________________________

I came across this video by accident. For a while I played this every time I was on the internet. It was my "home page" when the browser opened. It sometimes became background noise, sometimes became so un-ignorable that I would be snapped out of my Internet trance, and for a moment the rhythmic wind sound in the microphone, the air-static-noise would seem like the amplified sound of the air going in and out of my own body, and I could stop and feel like someone in a room again and think "Is this what I want to be doing? Am I stuck in an Internet Kettenkarrussel trance??? How's this going? How long am I planning to be on here?" This way the internet has a sound, so that when I'm on the internet, it felt like a thing, something with texture, not so abstract and unreal. And then when the sound is gone you can think, oh, it's gone now. The internet is gone.

ON_mirror_G,JLH-MB 3 Saturday, Jan. 24, 2015

"Push your face closer to the mirror, until your eyes can seemingly look into themselves (they include the other in their peripheral vision). Now focus on the world behind you, over your shoulder. What are you seeing? You are seeing the world behind you, while at the same time in the corner of your eye, you see your own eyes turned to the side. You see yourself looking. Now look back at your face. For a second, you see one eye, then your vision “snaps” to the “correct” focal length to see your face. Maybe your nose is so big, like mine, that it is somewhat out of focus if you look into your own eyes. Suddenly you see your familiar “2D” face is really in 3D. It’s disturbing, unusual, distancing. The sequence of focus on one thing, then on another, all the while knowing that you are looking at one continuous face (something that you usually don’t experience when looking at faces, this sequence of movement and focusing). You’ll feel a kind of vertigo, but remember, you’re right here, the actual 3D you, the whole time, looking into a mirror. If you felt some vertigo as you “moved and focused” back into your “true self,” that is the point.
We see ourselves and then we see a frame and then we see the wall and a ghostly image of our nose, and we see, out of the corner of our eye, someone (us?) in a flat surface on the wall, who also looks like we are looking down and to their (our?) right. It is difficult to explain, it is easier to just go over to a mirror and look."

-quoted from Jean Luc Heilegra, The Method and Being Notebooks Vol. 1.

Friday, Jan. 23

previews

preview of Ganges: The River at Night

Jan. 21

Jan. 20

As I get a little closer to the Ganges book I’ve been thinking a bit about Curses, my first book, from 2006. Here’s a link to a big scan of the cover (8MB) that I took off of a pirated online copy. You might enjoy zooming in on the textures and the cars, etc. if you have a big monitor, or even if you don’t.

(opening to Curses, 2006)

sunday fotos and miscellaneous

(from)

ON_mirror_G,JLH-MB 2 Saturday, Jan. 17, 2015

"Awakening, Glenn Ganges can sense where the 2D mirror ends and the 3D space he feels his body inhabiting. He looks into a mirror, fully aware of both what he is doing and what it means. "
-Jean Luc Heilegra, Method and Being, fig 2., note I: "Gangeses"

Impatient

4 Links

"Whence this character of universal spirality?"

exit smiling

waggish on Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money

Minima Moralia: Aphorisms 1-50

Waves

from upcoming Ganges

grid work

Hot and Cold

Drew this last Thursday, the day after the C. Hebdo attack. This tweet struck me in part because of the hot take vs. cold bodies setup, as a way to measure time, and as a way to allude to the aggression human beings feel as they try to communicate with each other, urgently, aggressively, clumsily, and also because the other hot topic of conversation on the internet that morning in my internet social media "circles" was how the weather was across much of the country was extremely cold. It struck me that there are different times for everything, and at the same time, of course, timing is everything. When it's cold and dark, like in the winter, or in times of fear and violence, one of the things it's good to do is to just sit together, rest for a while, silently or just saying what's necessary, nothing more, giving everybody as much space as they need to heal and be sane, but maybe sitting a little closer than usual, to fit a few more, come on in, sit down, there's plenty of space. Taking everything a little more slowly, sharing things, good food, warmth, pleasant sounds or silence, seeing and being seen, in a sort of animal togetherness, out of the wind.

(link to original tweet)

twitter comic

ON_mirror_G,JLH-MB 1 Saturday, Jan. 10, 2015

"We see first the mirror, then through the glass into infinite space."

-Jean Luc Heilegra, Method and Being

Jan. 9

January 8

Explaining Herriman to Katie

I have been thinking about Herriman and what amount of work he did every day, and wondering if I should base my life around that. I have no idea how much work he actually did every day, but OK, if you take the general newspaper cartoonist's workload as a model, let's say 4 panels per weekday, plus a Sunday. (I know Herriman's daily strips were much more complicated than a Peanuts strip—see here—but I'm trying to be somewhat realistic here about what I can actually accomplish). So, going by, say, a standard Gasoline Alley Sunday page this would add another 12 panels (plus a header).  So 6x4=24 (or should we take Saturday off? we're pro-union here) plus 12 is 36 panels? That's 6 panels a day, Sundays off. I was also thinking about Herriman's strip "The Family Upstairs," which I have not read very much of, and wondering the setup was supposed to be some kind of allegory?

Mr. Mizzabil

-I drew this in the summer of 1998. 

Planning the Year Ahead

-from Ganges 3

New Years card

copying Souther Salazar

Clip Art

Viral Webcomic

link to podcast

Book Review

Ninety-nine More Maggots, Mites, and Munchers
by May R. Berenbaum
-Insects are written about in short 1-2 page entries. This is a sequel. I did not read the first book. This short form is fitting for writing about insects. The form of the entries consists of: many puns, perhaps to add some light-heartedness to descriptions of the insectoid horror-world; some discussion of how each species affects the lives of human beings; and of course Latin name, life cycle, diet, mating, unusual behaviors and memorable peculiarities, etc.. Insects are strange and beautiful and they often mess up things for human beings by biting them or messing with their crops. I enjoyed reading this book. First I read it as something to help me fall asleep but then as pure pleasure and distraction for a troubled mind.

Podcast Appearance

I was interviewed for a podcast called Make It Then Tell Everybody

I enjoyed it. We talked over Skype.

Book Review

Science, Order, and Creativity

by David Bohm and F. David Peat

I bought this book at a sale because I thought the cover was so...unusual. Plus the title and the whole package was my kind of thing. There's stuff about fractals and Heisenberg and there's a chapter named "What is Order?" 

I didn't plan on reading it, but then one night I gave it a shot, and I saw that these guys really knew what they were talking about. They take us from physics to metaphysics, to meta-, and then on to the mystical and the cosmic and the everyday mind. By the end they're discussing Krishnamurti.

I like their idea of "false play" / "playing false:" This is when a person "is engaged in an activity that no longer has meaning in itself, merely in order to experience a pleasant and satisfying state of consciousness" but is now concerned with "reward or the avoidance of punishment." This not only screws with the "generative order of consciousness" but generates violence: the denial of the freedom of creative states of mind "brings about a pervasive state of dissatisfaction and boredom. This leads to intense frustration..." and deadened senses, intellect, and emotions, and the loss of a capacity for "free movement of awareness, attention, and thought." (I've been thinking back and forth about signing up with Patreon all week...)

A lot of thought went into this book. Reading it gave me a nice feeling of texture and struggle. It felt like good exercise for the mind AND the heart. Over-earnestness, a vision of the beyond, struggling with language — I can sympathize. 

As usual as I was reading I couldn't help but think more diagrammatic thinking would have helped, and not just thinking—more actual diagrams would have helped. I guess that's what the cover artist Andresj Dudzenski was trying to get at with the flower, cubes, etc. But the cover artist and the writers are using different metaphor-schemes, as far as I can tell. I don't remember any of those sorts of things (such as shaped holes and pegs, flowers or magnifying glasses) appearing inside the text.) Relatively speaking there are actually quite a few illustrations—fractals and geometric figures, and even the Baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch by Rembrandt and some JW Turner. 

But how about a sense of humor, an ironic sense? This book is pretty dry. Here's a sample of the writing: "Thus, if there are rigid ideas and assumptions in the tacit infrastructure of consciousness, the net result is not only a restriction on creativity, which operates close to the "source" of the generative order, but also a positive presence of energy that is directed toward general destructiveness." It's true, but it's not exactly powerfully written. In the end, though, it's hard for me to hold this against a book so dedicated to making clear this vision of reality which makes humor and compassion possible at all, by "operating close to the source of the generative order" in a spirit of openness and creativity.

Near the end:

Consider, for example, a hypothetical individual whose consciousness had been "cleared up" both in the individual and the cosmic dimensions. Although this person might be a model of wisdom and compassion, his or her value in the general context would be limited. For because of "unconscious" rigidity in the general infrastructure, the rest of humanity could not properly listen to this person and he or she would either be rejected or worshiped as godlike. In either case there would be no true dialogue at the social level and very little effect on the vast majority of humanity. What would be needed in such a case would be for all concerned to set aside assumptions of godlike perfection, which makes genuine dialogue impossible. In any case, the truly wise individual is one who understands that there may be something important to be learned from any other human being. Such an attitude would make true dialogue possible, in which all participants are in the creative "middle ground" between the extremes of "perfection" and "imperfection." In this ground, a fundamental transformation could take place which goes beyond either of the limited extremes and includes the sociocultural dimension.

-

Toast

Years ago I was very fortunate to follow along with some friends who were visiting Moriarty's studio/apt. in NYC. Seeing his work and how he lived in his studio and hearing him talk about it was extraordinary. He also has an incredible collection of jazz records, colorful shirts, and colorful Chuck Taylors. It wasn't until I saw heard him talk about his work, much of it hanging right there on the brick wall, some of it freshly worked over, that I really saw what he was doing in these paintings (these were some of the paintings that were in the big Kramers). 

He was painting memories from his own life, but changing them—painting his older self in place of his younger self, or changing himself into a girl instead of a boy, etc. Through this process, and through living every day in the same space with these large paintings, he wasn't just working on the paintings but also working on his own mind, his own life, drawing out and calling upon powerful forces—memories, especially of painful childhood moments, or of his parents who had passed on, and pivotal moments in his own life—and then sitting with them, living with them, the ghosts and echoes of them. 

I was already an "artist," I guess, by this point in my life, and I was playing around with comics a bit, but I'm a slow learner. It wasn't until this moment that I really in my bones understood that making art can be a technology for actually magically affecting reality, working with your life, through the transformation of memories and suffering and whatever else needs new life, into new symbolic forms, into meaningful objects, that we can sit with and look at and live with. 

There's that line from a Robert Penn Warren poem that David Milch is always quoting:         

                               This

is the process whereby pain of the past in its pastness

May be converted into the present tense

Of joy.

Check out Jerry Moriarty's tumblr (link) and UPDATE: (YouTube channel).

Gift Ideas

No exchanges allowed. – Human beings are forgetting how to give gifts. Violations of the exchange-principle have something mad and unbelievable about them; here and there even children size up the gift-giver mistrustfully, as if the gift were only a trick, to sell them a brush or soap. Instead, one doles out charity, administered well-being, which papers over the visible wounds of society in coordinated fashion. In its organized bustle, the human impulse no longer has any room, indeed even donations to the needy are necessarily connected with the humiliation of delivery, the correct measure, in short through the treatment of the recipient as an object. Even private gift-giving has degenerated into a social function, which one carries out with a reluctant will, with tight control over the pocketbook, a skeptical evaluation of the other and with the most minimal effort. Real gift-giving meant happiness in imagining the happiness of the receiver. It meant choosing, spending time, going out of one’s way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of forgetfulness. Hardly anyone is still capable of this. In the best of cases, they give what they themselves would have liked themselves, only a few degrees worse. The decline of gift-giving is mirrored in the embarrassing invention of gift-articles, which are based on the fact that one no longer knows what one should give, because one no longer really wants to. These goods are as relationless as their purchasers. They were shelf-warming junk from the first day. Likewise with the right to exchange the gift, which signifies to the receiver: here’s your stuff, do what you want with it, if you don’t like it, I don’t care, get something else if you want. In contrast to the embarrassment of real gifts, their pure fungibility still represents something which is more humane, because they at least permit the receiver to give themselves something, which is to be sure simultaneously in absolute contradiction to the gift.
In relation of the greater abundance of goods, which are available even to the poor, the decline of gift-giving may appear unimportant, and reflections on it as sentimental. However, even if it became superfluous in a condition of superfluity – and this is a lie, privately as well as socially, for there is no-one today whose imagination could not find exactly what would make them thoroughly happy – those who no longer gave would still be in need of gift-giving. In them wither away those irreplaceable capacities which cannot bloom in the isolated cell of pure interiority, but only in contact with the warmth of things. Coldness envelops everything which they do, the friendly word which remains unspoken, the consideration which remains unpracticed. Such iciness recoils back on those from which it spread. All relations which are not distorted, indeed perhaps what is reconciliatory in organic life itself, is a gift. Those who become incapable of this through the logic of consequence make themselves into things and freeze.

- Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (21)

-

Movie Ideas

Major League infielder turns out to be a serial killer who has built a (baseball themed?) dungeon below the basement of his house (or the stadium?) where he tortures and kills his victims - "The Second Basement."

Sequel: "The Third Basement."

I had a dream the other night that there was a Glenn Ganges movie in the works, and I was originally slated to play Glenn, but I was pushing for Colin Hanks. The plot of the movie was based on an original script: One day Glenn is surprised to discover a door he had never noticed before in the basement of his house, which leads to another basement below, and another, etc.