This mural was painted upside-down on purpose . . .

. . . so it looks right when it's reflected in the water.

What are non-Muslims really doing when they refrain from drawing Muhammad?

Jeet Heer writes in TNR:

Art Spiegelman’s comic strip commentary on the Charlie Hebdo controversy, “Notes from a First Amendment Fundamentalist,” delves deeply into these issues. In the cartoon, Spiegelman (limning himself in his stylized rodent form, developed for his graphic novel Maus) is holding two magazine covers (images within an image). One, titled "No Problem," features a standard smiley face and says, “Have a nice day.” The other, titled "Problem!," features the same smiley face wearing a turban and identified as “Mohammad.” As the contrasting images show, it takes just a few squiggles and a label to turn a smiley face into a blasphemous provocation. The offense isn’t so much in the image as in the intent. To say you are drawing the Prophet is the scandal, more than what is drawn. A drawing of Muhammad is an idea or an assertion more than it is a physical thing. . . .

Adherence to a rule that Muhammad should not be depicted is a very curious thing. Abiding by the prohibition can’t be an act of belief, since these publications aren’t run by Muslims who believe the prohibition is crucial to their faith (and in any case these publications have a secular mission and identity). Nor can the prohibition be just about displaying sensitivity to Muslim sensibilities since there is no consensus among Muslims that the prohibition should be adhered to or is binding among non-believers. In fact, certain strands of Islam, notably those in Iran, have a rich history of depicting the Prophet. A thorough prohibition on depicting Muhammad would, if followed by all, mean the banning of a rich vein of Islamic art.

What music looks like when you have synesthesia

Wow.

Insects made out of scrap metal

Um, wow.

Why are sports so popular?

This 4-minute voice memo helped me understand why sports are so popular.

I might have put some of his points in a different way. But I think Joel van Vliet has hit on something important here.

"All Creative Work Is Derivative"

Good point.

Jacques Barzun (1907-2012)

The New York Times reports:

Jacques Barzun, the distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history and came to see the West as sliding toward decadence, died Thursday night in San Antonio, where he lived. He was 104.

Mr. Barzun was a man of boundless curiosity, monumental productivity and manifold interests, encompassing both Berlioz and baseball. It was a life of the mind first cultivated more than a century ago in a childhood home outside Paris that became an avant-garde salon. . . .

He wrote dozens of books across many decades, demonstrating that old age did not necessarily mean intellectual decline. He published his most ambitious and encyclopedic book at the age of 92 (and credited his productivity in part to chronic insomnia). That work, “From Dawn to Decadence,” is an 877-page survey of 500 years of Western culture in which he argued that Western civilization itself had entered a period of decline.

Mr. Barzun was both of the academy and the public square, a man of letters and — he was proud to say — of the people. In books and in the classroom he championed Romantic literature, 19th-century music and the Western literary canon. He helped design the influential “great books” curriculum at Columbia, where he was one of its most admired figures for half a century, serving as provost, dean of faculty and university professor.

As an educator Mr. Barzun was an important critic of American universities, arguing in 1968 that their curriculums had become an undisciplined “bazaar” of miscellaneous studies.

I first read his book on writing, Simple and Direct, during high school, and I still reread it now and then. I still try to follow his guidelines on how to use the words "the" and "a," which turns out to be a surprisingly difficult matter.

Here are a few passages I've picked out from my copy of A Jacques Barzun Reader:

Removing ignorance in school is as painful as removing tonsils and calls for a rarer skill. Besides, the teacher should not use an anesthetic or be one. (593) (undated)

The purpose I gradually fashioned took the form of a resolve to fight the mechanical. . . . Where, then is this enemy? Not where the machine gives relief from drudgery but where human judgment abdicates. Any ossified institution — almost every bureaucracy, public or private — manifests the mechanical. So does race-thinking — a verdict passed mechanically at a color-coded signal. Ideology is likewise an idea-machine, designed to spare the buyer all further thought. (5) (from 1990)

Our love of order impels us to make theories, systems, sets of principles. We need them both for comfort and for action. A society, however pluralist, needs some beliefs in common and will not trust them unless they are labeled truths. It is there that our efforts betray us. Sooner or later, experience jabs us with an event, a feeling, or a perception that shatters the truth-value of the great inferred idea. . . [T]he breakup of old truths is painful, often bloody, but it does not condemn the search for truth and its recurrent bafflement, which are part of man's fate. It should only strenghten tolerance and make us lessen our pretensions. (18-19) (from 2000)

In a high civilization the things that satisfy our innumerable desires look as if they were supplied automatically, mechanically, so that nothing is owed to particular persons; goods belong by congenital right to anybody who takes the trouble to be born. This is the infant's normal greed prolonged into adult life and headed for retribution. When sufficiently general, the habit of grabbing, cheating, and evading reciprocity is the best way to degrade a civilization, and perhaps bring about its collapse. (9-10) (from 1990)

In presence of the highest art, you have to believe it to see it. (594) (undated)

[T]he abstract and the general (as Blake pointed out) are the death of art. It is because art embodies particulars that it deserves to be called a creation; that is why systems and absolutes falsify it under guise of giving us an explanation; and that is why also a lifelong student of art like John Jay Chapman said very soberly that "we cannot hope to know what it is." (592) (from 1947)

200 photos from the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison

To see the artist, title, and year, click on the slideshow. This will open a Flickr webpage with the information.

All the artworks are from the 20th and 21st centuries. The artists include Picasso, Magritte, Dalí, Miró, Warhol, and Rothko. (Link to the museum.)

How did art evolve?

E.O. Wilson explores the question. The article is about visual art, literature, and music; here are some of his thoughts on music:

The utilitarian theory of cave art, that the paintings and scratchings depict ordinary life, is almost certainly partly correct, but not entirely so. Few experts have taken into account that there also occurred, in another wholly different domain, the origin and use of music. This event provides independent evidence that at least some of the paintings and sculptures did have a magical content in the lives of the cave dwellers. A few writers have argued that music had no Darwinian significance, that it sprang from language as a pleasant “auditory cheesecake,” as one author once put it. It is true that scant evidence exists of the content of the music itself—just as, remarkably, we have no score and therefore no record of Greek and Roman music, only the instruments. But musical instruments also existed from an early period of the creative explosion. “Flutes,” technically better classified as pipes, fashioned from bird bones, have been found that date to 30,000 years or more before the present. . . .

Other artifacts have been found that can plausibly be interpreted as musical instruments. They include thin flint blades that, when hung together and struck, produce pleasant sounds like those from wind chimes. Further, although perhaps just a coincidence, the sections of walls on which cave paintings were made tend to emit arresting echoes of sound in their vicinity.

Was music Darwinian? Did it have survival value for the Paleolithic tribes that practiced it? Examining the customs of contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures from around the world, one can hardly come to any other conclusion. . . .

Anthropologists have paid relatively little attention to contemporary hunter-gatherer music, relegating its study to specialists on music, as they are also prone to do for linguistics and ethnobotany (the study of plants used by the tribes). Nonetheless, songs and dances are major elements of all hunter-gatherer societies. Furthermore, they are typically communal, and they address an impressive array of life issues. The songs of the well-studied Inuit, Gabon pygmies, and Arnhem Land aboriginals approach a level of detail and sophistication comparable to those of advanced modern civilizations. The musical compositions of modern hunter-gatherers generally serve basically as tools that invigorate their lives. The subjects within the repertoires include histories and mythologies of the tribe as well as practical knowledge about land, plants, and animals. . . .

It is self-evident that the songs and dances of contemporary hunter-gatherer peoples serve them at both the individual and the group levels. They draw the tribal members together, creating a common knowledge and purpose. They excite passion for action. They are mnemonic, stirring and adding to the memory of information that serves the tribal purpose. Not least, knowledge of the songs and dances gives power to those within the tribe who know them best.

To create and perform music is a human instinct. It is one of the true universals of our species. To take an extreme example, the neuroscientist Aniruddh D. Patel points to the Pirahã, a small tribe in the Brazilian Amazon: “Members of this culture speak a language without numbers or a concept of counting. Their language has no fixed terms for colors. They have no creation myths, and they do not draw, aside from simple stick figures. Yet they have music in abundance, in the form of songs.”

. . . To the same degree as literacy and language itself, [music] has changed the way people see the world. Learning to play a musical instrument even alters the structure of the brain, from subcortical circuits that encode sound patterns to neural fibers that connect the two cerebral hemispheres and patterns of gray matter density in certain regions of the cerebral cortex. Music is powerful in its impact on human feeling and on the interpretation of events. It is extraordinarily complex in the neural circuits it employs, appearing to elicit emotion in at least six different brain mechanisms.

Music is closely linked to language in mental development and in some ways appears to be derived from language. The discrimination patterns of melodic ups and downs are similar. But whereas language acquisition in children is fast and largely autonomous, music is acquired more slowly and depends on substantial teaching and practice. There is, moreover, a distinct critical period for learning language during which skills are picked up swiftly and with ease, whereas no such sensitive period is yet known for music. Still, both language and music are syntactical, being arranged as discrete elements—words, notes, and chords. Among persons with congenital defects in perception of music (composing 2 to 4 percent of the population), some 30 percent also suffer disability in pitch contour, a property shared in parallel manner with speech.

Altogether, there is reason to believe that music is a newcomer in human evolution. It might well have arisen as a spin-off of speech. Yet, to assume that much is not also to conclude that music is merely a cultural elaboration of speech. It has at least one feature not shared with speech—beat, which in addition can be synchronized from song to dance.

It is tempting to think that the neural processing of language served a preadaptation to music, and that once music originated it proved sufficiently advantageous to acquire its own genetic predisposition. This is a subject that will greatly reward deeper additional research, including the synthesis of elements from anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology.

An impossible font

Frustro.

(via)

Blogger of the Day: Megan Ganz, Meeting Notes

"Often when I sit, my brain keeps running." (via)

(Megan Ganz is a writer for the NBC show Community.)

Do you give to charity to help people or for other reasons?

Tim Harford wrote (in an old Slate article):

If people really were altruistic, there would be much less volunteering.

It would almost always be more effective to volunteer less, work overtime, and give more. A . . . banker can pay for a lot of soup-kitchen chefs and servers with a couple of hours' worth of his salary, but that wouldn't provide the same feel-good buzz as ladling out stew himself, would it?

In fact, the closer you look at charitable giving, the less charitable it appears to be. A recent experiment by John List, an economist at the University of Chicago, and a team of colleagues, showed that donations are less than magnanimous after all. Using controlled trials to compare different methods of door-to-door fund-raising, professor List's team discovered that it was much more effective to raise funds by selling lottery tickets than it was to raise funds by asking for money. This hardly suggests a world populated by altruists seeking to do the maximum good with their charitable cash. . . .

Even the way we choose to dole out cash betrays our true motives. Someone with $100 to give away and a world full of worthy causes should choose the worthiest and write the check. We don't. Instead, we give $5 for a LiveStrong bracelet, pledge $25 to Save the Children, another $25 to AIDS research, and so on. But $25 is not going to find a cure for AIDS. Either it's the best cause and deserves the entire $100, or it's not and some other cause does. The scattershot approach simply proves that we're more interested in feeling good than doing good.

For that last point, Harford credits Steven Lansburg, who elaborates on why the idea of "diversifying" doesn't make sense with charity the way it does in other areas:

When it comes to managing your personal portfolio, economists will tell you to diversify. When it comes to handling the rest of your life, we give you exactly the same advice. It's a bad idea to spend all your leisure time playing golf; you'll probably be happier if you occasionally watch movies or go sailing or talk to your children.

So why is charity different? Here's the reason: An investment in Microsoft can make a serious dent in the problem of adding some high-tech stocks to your portfolio; now it's time to move on to other investment goals. Two hours on the golf course makes a serious dent in the problem of getting some exercise; maybe it's time to see what else in life is worthy of attention. But no matter how much you give to CARE, you will never make a serious dent in the problem of starving children. The problem is just too big; behind every starving child is another equally deserving child.

That is not to say that charity is futile. If you save one starving child, you have done a wonderful thing, regardless of how many starving children remain. It is precisely because charity is so effective that we should think seriously about where to target it, and then stay focused once the target is chosen. . . .

If your charitable contributions are small relative to the size of the charities, and if you care only about the recipients (as opposed to caring, say, about how many accolades you receive), then you will bullet all your contributions on a single charity.

Tyler Cowen gives another reason to donate to relatively few different charities, though he avoids giving the extreme advice to donate to exactly one, in Discover Your Inner Economist (a great little book which I can't recommend highly enough):

Charities make most of their money off what is called a "house file." The house file consists of donors who have been giving loyally for years. A good house file . . . brings in much more than it costs to maintain. . . .

If a mailing brings in thirty cents for every dollar spent, that mailing probably went relatively well by the standards of the sector. A fifty-cent return per dollar spent is a smashing hit.

Why spend a dollar to get thirty or fifty cents? The answer is simple: the charity is investing in developing its house file. . . .

We now have a new way to make the world a better place. Once we have found some good charities, we should tell them not to rent out our name and address to other mailers. Virtually all charities rent out or swap names and addresses to similar groups; what better way is there to find new donors than to look for people who are already giving to related causes?

"Remove the name" requests save charities thousands of dollars on their mailing costs. (193-194)

A post on Less Wrong argued:

Imagine you are setting out on a dangerous expedition through the Arctic on a limited budget. The grizzled old prospector at the general store shakes his head sadly: you can't afford everything you need; you'll just have to purchase the bare essentials and hope you get lucky. But what is essential? Should you buy the warmest parka, if it means you can't afford a sleeping bag? Should you bring an extra week's food, just in case, even if it means going without a rifle? Or can you buy the rifle, leave the food, and hunt for your dinner?

And how about the field guide to Arctic flowers? You like flowers, and you'd hate to feel like you're failing to appreciate the harsh yet delicate environment around you. And a digital camera, of course - if you make it back alive, you'll have to put the Arctic expedition pics up on Facebook. . . .

[But] when your life is on the line, things like impressing your friends and buying organic pale in comparison. You have one goal - staying alive - and your only problem is how to distribute your resources to keep your chances as high as possible. These sorts of economics concepts are natural enough when faced with a journey through the freezing tundra.

But they are decidedly not natural when facing a decision about charitable giving. Most donors say they want to "help people". If that's true, they should try to distribute their resources to help people as much as possible. Most people don't. In the "Buy A Brushstroke" campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of £550,000 [about $850,000] to keep the famous painting "Blue Rigi" in a UK museum. If they had given that £550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics suggest it would have saved the lives of about one thousand two hundred people from disease. Each individual $50 donation could have given a year of normal life back to a Third Worlder afflicted with a disabling condition like blindness or limb deformity.

Most of those 11,000 donors genuinely wanted to help people by preserving access to the original canvas of a beautiful painting. And most of those 11,000 donors, if you asked, would say that a thousand people's lives are more important than a beautiful painting, original or no. But these people didn't have the proper mental habits to realize that was the choice before them, and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.

Last year, David Sedaris wrote about how he was able to get people to donate extra money to him, beyond just paying for his books, even when he was already a fabulously successful author (via):

A couple of books ago, I put a tip jar on my signing table and I made over $4,000 on my tour. The problem was then I started hating people who didn’t tip me. I didn’t say anything to them, but I would just sit there thinking, “You cheap son of a bitch. I just signed four books and you can’t even give me a dollar?” And why should they? But I just got so involved in it. I had to stop doing it.

I told people it was all for me to spend on candy. They were delighted because it’s funny to give money to someone who doesn’t need it. If there had been a beggar outside the bookstore, at the end of the evening, he might have had 75 cents where as at the end of my best evening in Dallas–[I had] $530 in tips.

Blogger of the Day: Lynda Barry, great cartoonist

Lynda Barry's blog is called The Near-Sighted Monkey, named after a recurring character. (via)

I love her octopus dictionary page.

Barry will be teaching a course at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin - Madison, in spring 2012.

Here's a very long, recent interview with her, and a shorter, older interview.

How much of a problem is it that you don't have enough time in your whole life to become "reasonably well-read"?

Linda Holmes observes, on NPR's website:

The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers.

Consider books alone. Let's say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That's quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let's say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you're 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you're 80. That's 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.

Let's do you another favor: Let's further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we'll assume you're willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.

Of course, by the time you're 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you're dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You'll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory ... I hope you weren't planning to go out very much.

You can hit the highlights, and you can specialize enough to become knowledgeable in some things, but most of what's out there, you'll have to ignore. (Don't forget books not written in English! Don't forget to learn all the other languages!) . . .

We could do the same calculus with film or music or, increasingly, television – you simply have no chance of seeing even most of what exists. Statistically speaking, you will die having missed almost everything.

That's a very quantitative way to look at it, as if the main thing that matters is what percentage of "everything" you've consumed. I don't see why that should be the standard.

It's analogous to the way people marvel at how "insignificant" humanity is because we're so small relative to the entire universe (which, by the way, would seem to imply that physically larger people are more important than smaller people — and surely we don't believe that). How big would we need to be in order to be "significant"? How much would we need to read, view, or listen to in order to be "well-read" or "cultured"?

Tyler Cowen's Discover Your Inner Economist offers a different way to look at this, which I find more meaningful. In the book's chapter on art, Cowen says we've become "cultural billionaires" — we just need to realize and take advantage of this fact. An overwhelming amount of great art is available to us for amazingly little money via libraries, museums, architecture (which you can see for free by walking down the street), Netflix, YouTube . . .

That doesn't solve the quantity problem. But we have so much access to such an astoundingly high level of quality that it would seem ungrateful to fuss over not having enough hours to get to most of it. We have enough time to live lives that are incredibly rich in literature and other art.

I happily admit there are whole genres of music that I consistently don't pay any attention to. "But that's so close-minded!" Well, it is and it isn't. I'm not making an objective judgment that these genres aren't worthwhile for anyone to spend time on. It's just that I, like everyone, have my own time management strategies. I've listened to Beethoven's symphonies a ridiculous number of times, always knowing there was some other piece of music I hadn't heard before, which I could have spent that time listening to . . . and I'll never hear it now. But I'm confident I've had good reasons for making such choices. I'm not worried I might be a little more ignorant of other musical genres, or novels I could have been reading at the time. I actually like the fact that I know much more about my own tastes than the vast majority of all content, of which I'm ignorant. This is part of the joy of life.

You wouldn't dream of trying to live in every city in the world, or even 10% of them, because that would mean you'd spend less time at home. Quality is more important than quantity.

The fact that everyone experiences such a limited number of books, paintings, songs, and cities adds to each individual's uniqueness. These experiences shape our identities. If we were all somehow able to read every book, and live in every city, we'd be much more similar to each other, and that would be really boring.

ADDED: Mindy Kaling has a related insight:

Don't worry about having perfect taste. People with perfectly curated taste usually have no original voice.

Are stories inherently left-wing?

That's the position taken by Tyler Cowen (who, for the record, is an emphatically moderate libertarian), in response to a liberal reader who wanted to find the definitive left-wing novel as a counterweight to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged:

I would say that the story per se is usually left-wing, in both good and bad ways. It elevates the seen over the unseen, can easily portray a struggle for justice, focuses on the anecdote, and encourages us to judge social institutions by the intentions of the people who work in them, rather than looking at their deeper and longer-term outcomes. Precisely because the story is itself so left-wing, there won't be a definitive example of the left-wing novel. Story-telling encourages context-dependent thinking, although not necessarily in an accurate manner. One notable feature of Atlas Shrugged is how frequently the story-telling stops for a long speech or an extended dialogue, in order to explain some first principles to the reader.

But a commenter on Facebook disagrees:

I don't think the story is a bad form for conservative thinking, even if in practice most novelists have been left-wing. The basic themes of identity, conflicts between good and evil, and personal struggles over adversity, temptation, etc all fit with both the novel and conservative thinking. But the novel is not at all suited to social science thinking, which . . . looks for systemic patterns. Social scientists dismiss as outliers events novelists would see as deeply significant.

Also: "Art is right wing."

How do they make ink?

This beautifully effective commercial for The Printing Ink Company answers the question (via):



(The music is the second movement of Beethoven's "Emperor" Piano Concerto (No. 5) played by Alfred Brendel.)

BLAM! Disney debases its classic cartoons for the lowest common denominator.

Like so many of us, I grew up on Disney cartoons. You know: Goofy, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse. I never would have expected that Disney itself would feel the need to mutilate these artworks to make them more commercial -- as if they weren't already fantastically appealing to kids.

That's exactly what the Disney Channel has done with a series called BLAM!, which I just found out about on Metafilter. The show follows the same formula for every segment: (1) take a classic Disney cartoon; (2) heavily edit it down to focus on the most violent, fast-paced gags; (3) have a narrator explain what's happening, with frequent plays on the show's title (example: "the United States of A-BLAM!-ica!"); (4) after each gag, provide a slow-motion replay with further explanations.

At every moment, the narrator violates the well-known rule of comedy that to explain a joke is to kill the joke. A Metafilter commenter calls it "slapstick for the hard of thinking."

Almost all the Metafilter comments mercilessly denounce the show. (A lone dissenter claims to like it unironically.) The show is being panned across the internet.

Here's one of the episodes -- and I warn you that it's a sad commentary on how our culture has been cheapened to a point you might not have thought possible:



One of the worst things about this particular segment is that it isn't providing narration where there was none. The original cartoon already had a perfectly dignified and subtle "straight man" narrator, but BLAM! replaces him with the opposite.

You can see more episodes -- if you can stand them -- at the top of the Metafilter post.

To show how far BLAM! deviates from the original work of art, here it is: "The Art of Skiing," 1941:

Cartoonist John Callahan is dead at 59.

John Callahan, the cartoonist known for his bleak and caustic sense of humor, died yesterday at 59 "from complications due to his paralysis." (Via Metafilter.)

I was never a huge fan of his work (which often seems overly self-conscious in trying to shock and offend), but I always found him a fascinating character. And I have to admire his nerve -- both for making cartoons that he must have known in advance would be hated, and for choosing an occupation from which most people would have thought him plainly disqualified. As a quadriplegic, he had to hold his pen between two hands, which accounts for his crude drawing style.

He was profoundly affected by a sequence of tragedies in his life that occurred from ages 8 to 21. This 2004 article told the story:

Callahan traces his first artistic stirrings to the fourth grade at St. Mary’s Academy. “I started drawing cartoons of rodents to amuse my friends in class,” he says. He also sketched Sister Joseph of Mary, a nun who liked to isolate him from other kids. “While they played at recess, I had to sit on a bench with her,” he remembers.

At the age of 8, he was sexually molested by a female teacher. To deal with the trauma, John began drinking at the age of 14. “I used the alcohol to hide the pain of the abuse,” he says. “I felt like an outsider in my family,” John recalls.

“It was a circumstantial thing. The relations with that nun really messed things up.”

Upon graduating from St. Mary’s Academy in 1965, John went to public school. “Catholic school was much more strict than public. In comparison, public school was boring.” As a result, John often skipped classes to drink with friends.

Gradually, his dependence on alcohol increased. “My philosophy was drink and live for the day,” he says. “On any given day, I’d have maybe twelve beers, wine, and whiskey.” He also experimented with other drugs, including marijuana and LSD. “LSD scared me, and pot made me paranoid,” John explains. Still, alcohol was his drug of choice, and would play a significant role in the event that would change his life forever. . . .

At the age of 20, John moved to Los Angeles. A year later, he was confronted with a life-altering twist of fate.

“I was simply riding with a friend,” he recalls. “I got too sleepy and too drunk, so I let my friend drive the car. He passed out at the wheel, and crashed into a signpost at 90 miles per hour. After that, I just remember a lot of lights and sirens.”

Although his friend was not hurt that badly, John’s spinal cord was severed, leaving him a C5-6 quadriplegic.

He kept drinking after the accident but stopped for good when he was 27.

You can buy several of his books on Amazon -- collections of his one-panel comics plus an autobiography. Two animated cartoon series were also based on his work. One is a show for adults that's still on the air in Canada and Australia and that, according to Wikipedia, "retains the violence, joie de vivre, and political incorrectness of his cartoons." The other one, surprisingly, was a children's show on Nickelodeon.

He posted his favorite hate mail on his website. I love this one:

Dear Sirs:

I am currently a guest at a htel [sic] in Boston, where these is a card store in the lobby. I noticed a highly distasteful and absolutely DISGRACEFUL postcard on the shelf. it was a John Callaham [sic] card that showed a group of cowboys in the dirt, with an empty wheelchair. The caption read "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot".

My Brother sits in a wheelchair, a quadrapalegic [sic], as a result of a diving accident at 19. Until Mr. Callahan can understand the emotions behind such a life of struggle, I feel he should not fell to freely about poking fun at the disabled. I find your marketing of his insensitivity positively DISGUSTING!

Sincerely

Allison F
Boston

That letter is so perfect that I wonder if it was actually written by a savvy fan just to make his day.

He also made music on the side, releasing an album of his songs in 2006. His music is very amateurish and probably wouldn't hold much interest if we didn't know who it was by. But watching him perform one of his songs in his living room is oddly touching:

Life is hard but death is worth it
Nothing is certain of being real
Give me something cheap but perfect
Touch me someplace I can feel

"An Open Letter to My Artistic Potential"

"Dear Potential,

"Don't act surprised. You had to know this was coming. You were my first love and I'll always treasure what we had, but I'm getting older and it's time to be honest: this isn't going anywhere. . . . "

Basil Wolverton: equal-opportunity cruelty

Today's New York Times has a detailed piece on the Basil Wolverton exhibit in New York City, including a slideshow of highlights from the exhibit.

I'd like to think their interest in the exhibit was piqued by the blog posts by me and my mom.

The author of the Times piece, Holland Cutter, says:

Wolverton’s art — I’ll use the word, though he shied away from it — could be incredibly cruel. The heads he drew look dreadfully diseased, or like genetic catastrophes, or like beings melted and scarred in an atomic blast.

Cutter then says that "his work comes across as spectacularly misogynistic," but he doesn't explain how that statement is consistent with his observation that "he turns men into freaks too." Based on what I've seen, he was at least as cruel to men, and he chose male subjects more often than women (even aside from his caricatures of real people).

As long as we're going to look at the art through a politically correct lens, wouldn't a more straightforward criticism be that his cartoons are offensive to people with actual deformities?

But why not judge for yourself? The exhibit runs till August 14 at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, which is on 515 W. 24th St. (between 10th and 11th Ave.) in the Chelsea neighborhood of NYC. If you happen to be nearby, I highly recommend it.