Monday Musings

Hey, check out yesterday's post if you're in the VT/NH/MA area -- these tickets are begging for a home for tonight's Emmy Lou Harris concert, and Sparky really means 'best offer.' Damn, wish we could go!

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Governor's Dorm, Johnson State College -- no, you can't see the subfloor in this shot. We were beneath notice then, and whoever is there now is likely living the subterranean life, too.

An explanation of the poem concluding yesterday's post:

In my two years at Johnson State College, where I met Sparky (aka Mark Whitcomb), Peter Jillson dubbed all we 'subhumans' (habitants of the sub-floor at Governor's dorm) with ludicrous nicknames.

I was knighted "Roadside Frog," which some of my JSC amigos still use when contacting me; the heart-rending poem was Sparky's moving testimonial to the Roadside moniker.

Composed under the influence? Oh, heaven forbid!
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Met with CCS grads and good friends Jon-Mikel Gates and Colleen Frakes here at our happy home last night, savoring some coffee and conversation on Marge's new screened-in backyard porch while Jon-Mikel showed me his cover design for S.R. Bissette's Blur, Volume 1 (1999-2000), coming soon from Black Coat Press. This initial cover determines the template for all four volumes, so Jon's properly focused on this first cover to wrestle with the needs of the entire series.

Jon's working with two collage-paintings I completed last year for the project, designed to work as four interlocking covers. The challenge for me, given the current corporate proprietary monitoring of images from their films, was to evoke the 'blur' of three years of video/DVD viewing (and the content of the books) without utilizing recognizable (read: actionable) imagery from any specific films. I worked with abstractions of 35mm film and TV monitor frames, each containing evocative teases of organs, images, textures and motion. Jon-Mikel has embraced the challenge admirably, and I'm happy with the initial results.

It's looking good, and we'll be posting the cover (and that of the subsequent three volumes) here as soon as Jon's wrapped up the design work.

Here's the current info/order site at Black Coat Press; these are fat reads at 250+ pages per volume, collecting all my 1999-2001 weekly film and video reviews; more news as the covers are completed and books are ready to ship!

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The summer has hardly been 'down time' amid the Center for Cartoon Studies cartoonists community.

Even as we lowly faculty are working through our class plans for the coming semester, the CCSers are already hard at work on a new anthology for the upcoming SPX this fall.

Title: Dead Man's Hand. Sample logo (by Cayetano Garza aka Cat) above -- not the final logo per se, but the first shot (pun intended) as work is underway on a variety of western tales. Jon-Mikel started our powwow last night by showing me a sketchbook exercise for his story. The storytelling muscles are flexing, the fingers twitching over pencils and pens, eyes narrowing for the showdown --

More news when everyone is damned good and ready to announce something; I've already said too much!

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Let's wind down today with another Sparky poetic concoction from the mid-'70s JSC years, to be read with Henry Gibson's Laugh-In vocal delivery ringing in your head:

Detente Or Debutante

Detente or Debutante
That is the question
One says
Put away your missiles
The other says
Is that a rocket
In your pocket

Spark

(an ode to Henry Gibson)