Archive for August, 2007

Winsor McCay - Little Nemo In Slumberland Vol 1

Saturday, August 25th, 2007
click for larger versions Winsor McCay - Little Nemo In Slumberland Vol 1
[Checker Book Publishing 2007]

I hope and dream the time will come when serious artists will make marvelous pictures that will love and live in life-like manner and be far more interesting and wonderful than pictures you now see on canvas. I think if Michelangelo was alive today he would immediately see the wonders… The artist can make his scenes and characters live instead of stand still on canvas in art museums.

Winsor McCay, Cartoonist
WNAC Radio Broadcast, New York, September 1927

Winsor McCay's Little Nemo In Slumberland Volume 1 provides […] every known episode from October 13th 1905, the very first, until August 15th 1909. Never before published in complete collected form. In addition, another first: all forty-three episodes of McCay's first color Sunday feature, Tales of the Jungle Imps, as published in the Cinncinati Enquirer in 1903. Bonus promotional material includes playbills, posters, Little Nemo merchandise and more.

So thrilling is McCay's imagination to residents of the 21st century, we may forget what reactions such unbelievable contraptions, settings and stories may have caused among modernist early 20th century viewers. When Nemo began dreaming, Americans were still adjusting to the idea of a real flying machine, yet Nemo and his friends flew in everything from balloons and goose-drawn carriages to the backs of hawks and apparatus straight out of DaVinci's notebook. Also relatively new to readers of the era was Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and the idea that dreams were the only link to the true sub-conscious desires of humanity. Fantastical lands laced with satirical social commentary were the order of the day — Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Barrie's Peter Pan were already considered classics and the public was ready for another young hero.

Is Little Nemo In Slumberland a true barometer for pre-world war America? Staggering under low wages and poor working conditions of the industrial revolution, readers saw Nemo continually in danger from some sort of technology. True to the residual optimism of the day, Nemo always wakes before the threat of disaster is fulfilled. He is hopeful and questioning, often amazed and mostly mistrusting of technology that is new to him. Qualities that exemplify modernist society. Notice also the more unpleasant realities of the early American social structure: racial and ethnic prejudice, sexism, and class separation. Conversely, McCay himself needed Nemo as an emotional salve and clearly believed in a cartoonist's duty to entertain and cheer. Thus, after a great tragedy like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake or the stock market panic of 1907, Nemo and friends waited in the Sunday Herald to provide solace.

McCay once wrote, "I was never so happy as when I was drawing Little Nemo."

Drop the tent peg or I'll shoot!

Sunday, August 12th, 2007

It was sadly inevitable. Gordon Brown's government are encouraging the police to use the new 'anti-terror' laws against peaceful protesters in the UK. (That is the Gordon Brown who is the unelected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.)

These are climate change protesters who are against the further expansion of Heathrow airport, exercising the long-held right to peaceful protest in the UK.

This means that peaceful protesters will be subject to being stopped and searched and having their vehicles searched without there being any evidence to suspect them of terrorism. Their homes can also be searched and they can be held by the police for a month without charge.

It has been said since the introduction of the new powers in the S44 Terrorism Act 2000 that these laws would be used to erode the freedom of ordinary UK citizens. This is the first widely reported case of this process in action.

This is the government using its laws to protect the business interests of wealthy companies like BAA at the huge expense of the rest of us. But this shouldn't come as a surprise, there's a long history of laws being created and used to protect and bolster the interests of the wealthy few and destroy the power of the poor majority.

So now, if you hold some concern about the state of the planet and decide to voice that concern, according to the government, you could be a terrorist.

"Put that veggie-burger on the ground and your hands on your head."

The Plane Stupid Campaign Group
The Camp for Climate Action

Survival Techniques

Saturday, August 11th, 2007
I saw a picture of a balloon suddenly and unexpectedly soaring and some people still holding onto the ropes connected to the balloon were suddenly jerked into the air and most of them didn't have the survival IQ to let go in time. Seconds later they are sixty, a hundred feet off the ground. Those who didn't let go fell off at five hundred or a thousand feet. A basic survival lesson is: Learn to let go.

Put it another way: Never hang on when your Guardian tells you to let go.

Right Now.

Suppose you were holding one of the ropes? Would you have let go in time, which is, of course, at the first upward yank? I'll tell you something interesting. You would have a much better chance to let go in time now that you have read this paragraph than if you hadn't read it. Writing, if it is anything, is a word of warning …

Let Go!

William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands [Viking Penguin 1987]
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