Nudity You Can't See

An art director and friend of mine was clearing out her and her husband's huge collection of books and ephemera and came across something that I thought only existed in jokes: The Braille edition of Playboy. No centerfold, I am assuming.

On the other end of the spectrum, artist Jason Salavon has gone into centerfold overload. He created art by blending the images of every Playboy centerfold, mathematically averaging the color and value of each, one per decade. This is every Playmate from the 1980's:

So Miss November 1981, who presumably does not appear in the Braille edition above, is hidden amongst the pixels here. To see the art based on other decades, click here. I really like how they are completely luminous and ethereal, like a soul should look.

Salavon has done similar amalgamations (his term) of class photographs, special moments, and architecture, video amalgamations of late night talk shows, and an audio amalgamation of twenty-seven versions of the song "Yesterday." He also has interesting art based on still frames from movies. 

I obviously can't get enough of this kind of thing. Once I created visual formulas to depict some of my friends (you know, "You are like two parts Yukon Cornelius and one part D-Day and a dash of My Name is Earl") and one of them created a similar formula for me. It included Duchamp, John Linnell from They Might Be Giants, and the animated groom from The Corpse Bride, among a half dozen others. I blended them all together, Salavon-style, to create a metaphysical portrait of me:
Salavon creates his own software to make his art; I just fiddled with Photoshop layers. Here are my friends Scott, Wayne, and Fran, done the same way. Hidden in there are Saddam Hussein, Orson Welles, George Harrison, Dylan Thomas, Terry Gilliam, Casper the Ghost, and many others.

Why designers can include movie tickets as business expenses

My friend Scott, who is responsible for pointing me in the direction of much that is awesome, sent me this link to an ever-expanding website that collects screen captures of movie titles, from A:

to Z:

(Zathura, by the way, is by no means the last one on the list, what with Zombies being on Broadway and Zontar being from Venus and so on. Similarly, Anatomy of a Murder is preceded by lots of Alien and Abbott and Costello movies. I just like the looks of these two.) It's interesting to me to see how many different solutions there are to the problem of putting the movie's title up on the screen. There's the Woody Allen approach, simple and unchanging from film to film, creating a kind of brand for the director:

Then there are the ones that really set the stage for the film, like an illustrated book cover:

And apart from the first image on this blog entry, which I included as a personal favorite, I haven't even looked past the A and Z pages. Lots of treasures to unearth.

Mea Culpa

I am a bad blogger. I realize the key to being a good blogger is fresh content. I know this because when the half dozen blogs I check daily do not have fresh content, I am disappointed. Of course, you are saying, "Greg, instead of reading other blogs, shouldn't you be writing your own? Wouldn't that help?" I hear you, imaginary reader of my blog. So here is an end-of-the-year wrapup of all new stuff:

An actual unretouched photo of what the recent Moon/Jupiter/Venus alignment looked like, in China. It was impressive here in Pleasantville, but it wasn't a smileyface. A friend of a friend took this photo, and said through the mutual friend I could post it, but didn't want his name used. So I figured I shouldn't name the mutual friend either, to throw the Chinese government off the trail or whatever it is we are trying to avoid, but thanks, mutual friend and anonymous photographer.

A sketch by one of my ten-year-old students. She did it as a joke, and was probably going to throw it away, but I think it is awesome in a Daniel Johnston kind of way.

A piece I did for a gallery show curated by my friends Jordin Isip and Rodger Stevens. It's called "Harold Grows Up." Every participant was given a lovely piece of wood and instructions to incorporate a horizontal line at a specific height, so that the overall effect was a continuous dividing line/horizon running through all the art, all of which were hung butted up against each other running the length of the gallery. I have done work for other shows created/curated by these guys, and never sold anything, so when this piece sold I was pleasantly surprised. My twelve-year-old predicted it would sell: "It's a character people know, and it's like, a gag." I gotta listen to him more often. See this and other recent art on my you-don't-have-to-be-a-member-of-facebook facebook page. The link is up there in the right column also.

The piece at the very top of this entry was done for Yale Alumni Magazine, and it is about the psychology of witch hunts, and it is probably my favorite thing I did this year.

New Years Resolution: Spread out this content (God how I hate that word) over weekly installments instead of doing it all at once.

How 'Bout Some Illustration?

Yes, I do illustrations. I just end up thinking about lots of other things and probably a part of me wonders who wants to see my artwork anyway. So here is one. This was used in Yale Alumni Magazine and accompanied an article that presented the theory that the great thinkers of the Enlightenment were not necessarily the originators of revolutionary ideas, and that many of their ideas came from so-called common people. The great thinkers synthesized and codified these grassroots ideas. I like this theory.

A New World?

The morning after my son Jacob was born, I was walking through the crowded streets of Manhattan, looking at everyone and realizing that they didn't know the world was a fundamentally different place. Of course, that was only true for the very few people affected by this particular brand new human being, but for me it was a seismic shift. (Years later I read an old Kurt Vonnegut story that expresses the exact same scenario and feelings.) Then on September 11, 2001, and for weeks after, I felt that once again that the world was fundamentally changed. And now I am happy to report I feel this for the third time in my life. Several neighbors have told me it was my Barack-o-lantern that put him over the top. I don't know about that—New York is traditionally a blue state, and it was a rush job—but here it is.

I Heart Halloween

Yes, it's my favorite holiday. It's not even a real holiday--there is still mail delivery and banking. But it does offer the dual pleasures of being creative and seeing how others are creative. This weekend was the Pleasantville Ragamuffin Parade, where all the kids and a few brave adults show off their Halloween finest, in a kind of dry run for Halloween. Each year I am inspired by the variety of costumes on display. And of course the homemade ones are my favorites. This year my daughter Olivia is part of a group costume. Since all the major Candyland characters (Queen Frostine, Gramma Nutt, Mr. Mint, etc.) had already been claimed, she was asked to be the game board. 

This thrilled me as I am a big fan of inanimate objects as Halloween costumes. In the past I have dressed as the Empire State Building, a #2 pencil, and a bottle of Elmer's glue. So for Olivia I painted an old choir robe from a rummage sale, and my wife made earrings and did hair and makeup. The colored path wraps around to the back and theoretically could be used for actual game play, although the order of squares is wildly inaccurate.

I think everyone likes Candyland because it is the first board game we all play. So like Crayola Crayons or Grover, it provokes a happy memory. Also, it is about candy. Come to think of it, that's why I like Halloween so much. Candy.

A Museum in Paris with no "art"

We went to England and Paris in August. My kids had never been overseas, and Kat and I hadn't been in fifteen years at least. None of us had ever been to Paris. I won't burden you with all our vacation pictures, so here are just a few from a museum I had never heard of. It was one of my favorite places in Paris.

This is a manhole cover outside the Musee de Arts et Metiers in Paris. He is winking because he probably looks up women's skirts all day.

A box of beautiful wooden geometric shapes, apparently a teaching tool. I coveted it.

Lots of machines in this museum. I love gears.

Me in a space helmet. But not really IN the space helmet.

My son Jacob at the museum's Metro stop. It was all copper, and felt like we were inside Captain Nemo's Nautilus. The whole museum had a Jules Verne-meets-Dumbledore's office feeling.

Most of the objects in the museum had English captions, but not this flying machine. So I have no idea if it was ever flown (the propellers are giant feathers) or even intended to be flown (did I mention the giant feathers?). I loved how the hard science and the fanciful ideas were all in the same museum.

A lion and a serpent made entirely from glass (fiberglass fur and scales). My daughter Olivia is flesh and blood.

Cool clock that I imagine can send you back or forwards in time.

Spy cameras disguised as a gun and a book. Was there a time when a gun was seen as a lesser threat than a camera? "Drop the camera! Oh, never mind, it's only a gun."

A pair of zoetropes.

A phenakistoscope. Yes, I had to look it up.