If I were free

My sister- Carol Cruikshank- was a very talented artist, even from a young age. I scanned one of her sketchbooks and put it up on Flickr- it plays as a slideshow
http://www.flickr.com//photos/funonmars/sets/72157629106907167/show/
(As long as you keep your mouse away from it the bottom tray of pictures won't show.)

She drew this when she was 15 or 16 in a little booklet tied together with yarn. This was in 1957! So many of the ideas are still fresh. She died twenty years ago. Today's her birthday.

Obsolete Formats

We've been printing many of my films in 35mm this last month, for archival reasons, and checking the prints at the Fotokem lab in Burbank, in a screening room.

I'm always uncomfortable looking at my own work, but when I saw these prints at Fotokem I was shaken up a bit. Film looks SO GOOD, so totally different from any dvd or digital format. Geez! Animation! Cels! But only a handful of specialty labs are even printing film now, and in the years ahead all the studio releases will be coming out as digital only. (2014 already declared by studios as no film releases anywhere.) So if you have film negs think about printing them now.

Although my cartoon "Quasi at the Quackadero" was put on the National Film Registry list of films worthy of preservation, the list comes with no perks as to preservation (or even a piece of paper to frame and put on the wall!) In fact even the link to the pdf which came to me as official notification was a broken link!
Government.

Film is the latest obsolete format. wow! The world is becoming so damn virtual.

I've often wondered if the monster magnet from outer space really appeared what would happen to our collective culture? Then the Republican candidate I find most unappealing, (though it's hard to narrow that group down),Newt G, mentioned this in some recent debate as a real threat.

I'm going to write about my own computer history. I poured so much energy and YEARS into Flash, and before that into some other formats that also scream obsolete format.

Stay tuned.

CIAO!

So the day is finally almost here. We leave for New York in the morning and then for Italy on Friday.

We have to take Molly to the kennel this afternoon. She senses something's up. It's a nice place where she's staying, but it's the hardest thing about traveling for us.

I posted a silly storyboard for my section of Toons x 9 here. The illustration above is from the storyboard. Just something to keep you laughing. It was a peculiar project- 9 animators retelling Faust.

I opted for a soap opera approach to hell- at the time airlines weren't as nasty as they are now and computers weren't part of most people's lives. I didn't ever color it in and got rushed to even scan this and put it on line. I never saw what any of the other animators did. In fact I don't even know who they were. Marv Newland (Bambi Meets Godzilla) paid us to do it. Faust is no treat to read, let me tell you! The link is slow to load even though I broke it into segments, and you'll see a white screen before the loading symbol kicks in.

One more thing about the toons project. Aloosha was based on a woman I met the last time I was in New York, 22 years ago! Her name was Lizzie Borden and she was a filmmaker who hoped we'd collaborate on something. She had that "I work out all day" look. I forget if she was a kleptomaniac or not!

I had insane good luck at the track last week and will buy a new tablet computer when I get back, and I guarantee no way in hell will it be a Mac.

Don't even get me started on Steve Job's arrogance re Flash, when you can read it in the paper anyway!

Have fun while I'm away, and hope to check up on you all from an internet cafe in Italy.

For a Laugh

After I posted this little cult outfit on Facebook I tried to find the original storyboards for the animated/live action feature which I wrote in 1982. It seemed all that was left were some beat up xeroxes, but after I'd scanned a bunch of them I found the original four volumes of pictures.

I've popped them into a little presentation which is on line here. A few of the storyboard pages were in full page comic strip format so when I separated the individual panels I had to blow up the images quite a bit.

Let me know if it's hard to navigate- I was feeling a bit lazy when I put it together. It's just the first act or so but there's some funny stuff going on.

off to Bay Area

Flying out in the morning to see Dinah in Davis, then going to San Francisco late Saturday where I'll meet Linda Davick and see old pal Jane (prb here). Weather looks as if it's awful, but should be good times ahead.

Funny but when I think about San Francisco, for all the years I worked there, my mind still goes back to that first job I had working as a cocktail waitress at Earthquake McGoon's for about 3 months. You can read about the place here . It was very memorable.

In fact a few scenes of the movie "The Organization" starring Sidney Poitier were shot in the Magic Cellar, underneath MaGoon's, and I'm even in a scene or two.

As I understand it, the building on Clay St. is long gone.

Quasi's Big Day

This morning when I got up my friend Michael had emailed me that my film "Quasi at the Quackadero" had been included in 2009 National Film Registry.

"The National Film Preservation Board members enthusiastically supported this addition to the more than 500 U.S. films now recognized as "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" and worthy of preservation."

I want to toast E.E. Gregg Snazelle. Right after college I rented an editing room at Snazelle Films in San Francisco so I could finish my third film, "Chow Fun." Gregg saw the film and offered me a job at his film company. The job was to experiment with animation, and do commercials for him when the jobs came in. He also hoped I'd figure out how to solve 3-d without glasses.

Needless to say I didn't solve 3-d. I didn't even do very many commercials over ten years, but I showed up at 8:30, took an hour off for lunch and worked till 5:30. I was paid $350 a month, and I could live on that then.

He encouraged me generously without ever paying much attention to me. These days if an opportunity like that even existed, you'd be forced to sign all kinds of rights statements for characters and content created, but this was before "Star Wars" and he just seemed to be happy to have me around. We were never particularly close. It spoiled me for any job after that.

I made all my "Quasi" films while I was working at Snazelle. Unfortunately he's no longer alive, but here's to you, Gregg, with a big heart and much thanks.

A letter from Jan. 18, 1981

My mother, my sister and I wrote each other many letters, and some of them I've saved. I was going through a box the other day and I thought this letter my mother had written me in 1981 really gives you a sense of her vivid imagination, and where mine comes from.

The first part of the letter, which I left out, was about whether my sister should come with me on a lecture tour. (My mother was against it.) The rest of the letter is below:

I just read your "Dome of Peace ". It' s a beautiful story Sally and once again I can't get over the gift you have for writing. I knew you had done some interesting things at Smith but didn't realize the extent of your creative abilities.

I like this story particularly because it is positive. The world needs to hear and read of victorious characters. The character in your story is confronted with destructive forces and manages to be victorious over them. So many writers like to leave their characters in hopeless defeat or hopeless anxiety.

Of course that is the true meaning of Christianity--victory. I never told Daddy but I had the deepest respect for Martin Luther King--"I have a dream" and "We can overcome", just think
what he accomplished in his short life . Writers can have tremendous influence on people without ever knowing it. I am so moved by what I read that I have to make vigilant choices.

I actually gave up novels because I couldn't read them like regular people. I was "them" in the novel and couldn't do anything else till I was finished with "them". That's why I like biographies and autobiographies. I know the people turned out O.K. so I can read at my leisure, like regular
people. Even here I find myself wanting to copy down all the wise conclusions they come to so my children can have the benefit of them! With Schweitzer I was in steaming Africa, with Zelda Fitzgerald in the nut house, with Baruch on Wall Street, and so it goes... There are many people, not in the public eye who live victoriously and it is these people who deserve plaudits, like Enether and Jean Wallace.

Must close this, I am taking Bee Burnett to church and because she wants to/will sit thru a lecture on Islamic religion set up by the education dept at St. Pauls. Talk about negative! Who ever said I was prejudiced! If he isn't too darling about it I may find it interesting. He is a
professor, not a missionary.

My afternoon is going to be wonderful. First the football game and then the tennis!

Lots of love

Mom

(The letter was typewritten and I was able to scan it and then use a program that recognized the text to paste it here. )

All Over the Globe

When I spoke to my mother today the ship she thinks she's on had passed through the Panama Canal. Now they were in Japan, and people talked too fast and she had never liked the place or the people. She said she missed America.

I tried to pull her back to reality by talking about my brother. "Cricket's in Africa," I said. (It's true- he's visiting his daughter in Mozambique.) She knew this. She remembered that his daughter had been ill in Africa earlier this year.

At the end she said "Lovely of you to call." Ta ta!



What I've been thinking is that with baby boomers approaching the falling down age, researchers had better get on the stick with studies of anesthesia and its effect on the elderly, or "The Magical Mystery Tour" will have a total new meaning.

These images from a wonderful site, Cruising the Past.

Another tough dog from long ago

As I was looking through the giant pile of cd-roms to find replacement software for my old computer, I came upon a cd of this photograph.

I sold this on ebay about six years ago. A bidding war ensued and it sold for more than $700. It wasn't much bigger than a postcard. Two women who both loved pitbulls were battling. You may not be able to tell, but the girl's holding a pistol and the pitbull has his, uh, lipstick showing.

While trying to revive my laptop I've come upon all sorts of weird solutions that people say work, like "Turn it on, put it in a plastic bag, then cover it with several towels. Wait 45 minutes, turn it off, then turn it on again and hold down the j-k-l keys." Not the h-e-l-p keys?

It didn't work. People are trying to put together a class action suit for this particular hp tablet laptop.

Been a while

Yeah, holiday spirit. I've been trying to put my computer back together again and I came upon this picture Dinah created about 8 years ago. That's our old dog Lulu on the front porch in Colorado.

Reading Manly Men Bios!

Ha, got you there! While I was in New Jersey I read Robert Mitchum's biography, "Baby, I Don't Care." What a character, this big sexy coolster, part Norwegian, part Indian, smarter than anyone would expect and hard to define. The book is a bit long (500+ pp) but you think about him long after it's done. One of the things people remembered about him the most, aside from his "I don't care" bohemianism, and his incredible face, was that he was a great story teller.

Last summer I was really intrigued by Raoul Walsh's autobiography,"Each Man in his Time" . As a child his parents entertained famous Broadway actor of the day Edwin Thomas Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth whom Walsh was later to play in The Birth of a Nation (1915). They lived on a farm somewhere near Harlem and entertained all the most famous people of their day it seemed.

Being an autobiography, this book had a lot more insight into the life of a man who traveled with and filmed Pancho Villa in Mexico, and had stories that were just breathtaking. He didn't seem happy except when he was making a movie. He was a director for 50+ years!

Robert Mitchum and Raoul Walsh intersect briefly in the 40's.

What got me thinking was this: both men were known for being great story tellers, both men were major figures in Hollywood history. Who's a great story teller anymore? Movies today have so little story line. People today rarely tell stories in social situations. Hmm, is there something here?

And that's actually the point of this post. I got to thinking.

Finger Paintin

well it won't make the cover of the New Yorker, but I drew this with my finger on my phone while I was visiting my mother last week and it expresses what the visit was like.

What came to mind about it most was this- imagine the span of a lifetime as a dirty windshield. Think of the worn wipers going back and forth, getting stuck in a certain spot each time. That's what it's like for my mother right now. All different parts of her life are recurring, but the place where she gets stuck the most is in Princeton, where my brother is rowing in a race (40 years ago) and she can't get to the race in time. Or she can't get the paper where the race is written up.

When I'd see her first thing in the morning she'd be pretty lucid, but then the little cups of pills which I guess she needs for all kinds of reasons, would start jamming her mind. Her eyesight is poor now too so that makes it easier for her to imagine these other places and times. Another recurrent theme was that we were on a not very nice ocean liner, and when were we going to reach land?

I was glad for the lucid moments but it also makes it even harder dealing with the dementia, because Ithink I can just straighten her out by explaining a few things.

Thanksgiving Day was great, but the buildup was really rough going, especially since we never reached land.

A spooky house

We passed this deserted house on a hike the other day. I wonder how long it's been deserted.

Here's the outside of the spooky house:

Sunset Strip

We get some beautiful sunsets up here. I discovered if I set the auto to ISO it catches the light better.

Speaking of sunsets, last night we watched "Richard Pryor Live on Sunset Strip." What a brilliant and funny guy. It was released in 1982, so it was interesting that they cut away to Jesse Jackson in the audience several times, also to Alan Alda.

Feelin Like a Million

Or maybe a million and a half... A childhood friend sent me the news that the house I grew up in is for sale for $1,450,000! It didn't look like a bed and breakfast when I lived there, and as far as my brother and I can remember, there was one bathroom upstairs, one in the attic, and a toilet in the basement. It was brown and white and had a lot of character but didn't have this formal la-dee-da look. My parents bought it for $13,000 and my mother said there were rats in the basement when they moved in, and it had been a boarding house. For awhile we had Hungarian refugees in the attic. I'll never forget seeing catfish swimming in the bathtub up there.

One thing it used to have, that this fancy redo can't replicate, was a wonderful secret staircase that went from the kitchen to the landing on the stairs. Originally intended for unsightly servants, it was wonderful to hide in.

I did see the house in its lavender incarnation a few years ago, and noticed the dog on the porch was wearing a bandana that matched the seat cushions on the porch.

Camp Memories?

I was wondering if the camp I went to in 1960-1961 still existed. It was Camp Hillsboro in New Hampshire. I thought maybe it had been turned into an artists' colony, or a Christian retreat. One of the camp songs we sang (in the middle of the Cold War) was

"1-9-6-1 at Hillsboro Camp-
No other year the same-
Every girl a comrade true-
Ready to die or do-o-o-o-"

I think I threw out my camp photo album just this year. Then I learned somehow through Facebook, that though the camp is long closed, they stage a reunion for the old girls each year where they come back and stay in the original cabins- I remember mine was named "Nut House"-- and eat in the dining hall and sing the songs, including the one about the comrades. Then they paddle on the lake.

I went to the camp by myself, on the train, from New York City.

I even found an article about someone who went to one of the reunions. The Sally in the article isn't me.
It got me wondering about the camp my sister went to, which sounded grander, out in Easthampton, Long Island. She made two life long friends there. I was trying to remember the name. My mother said, "something about fire or fireplace". We laughed because it didn't sound quite right. But it was right. It was Fire Place Lodge. A little about it here. Condensed, here:

Fire Place Lodge became a girls' camp in 1936, when Adelaide Mershon Purcell, the proprietor of a private music school in Montclair, N.J., took over. Mrs. Purcell had a local connection through a grandfather, the Rev. Stephen L. Mershon, who was minister of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church in 1854.

"It is the aim of the Fire Place Lodge to combine with a full out-of-door camp life, a greater love of the artistic through music, pageantry, nature, and song," she told prospective parents.

Campers aged 5 to 20 came for eight-week sessions, which cost $275 in 1941, and local children from 2 to 4 years old were invited to attend "Little Miss Muffet's House," a kind of musical nursery school.

Instruction in "aesthetic dancing," pageantry ("dramatic interpretation of the lives of famous composers and their compositions"), crafts, and fine arts, including a visit to the East Hampton Art Gallery, was balanced with hikes along "old Indian trails," nature study at "The House of the Seven Dwarfs," sailing and navigation in "Davey Jones's Locker," astronomy, and instruction in signaling and semaphore, taught by Capt. W. Barnes of East Hampton, a former chief of the Georgica Coast Guard station.

William Woolnough, riding master at the East Hampton Riding Academy, where the young Jacqueline Bouvier learned to ride, gave lessons. Members of the "Isaac Walton club" went fishing, crabbing, and clamming. Cows and other livestock were cared for at the camp farm. Many local people were employed at the camp.

Along with "the music of nature as interpreted by the sea, the wind, the trees, and the songs of the birds," there were lessons in singing, piano, and woodwind and stringed instruments. Campers staged an operetta at the close of each summer session.

Sounds pretty nice, don't you think? Do you have good camp memories?

Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies

How many of these do you remember? We had a Grapho-Scope in the basement when I was little. It was really hard to make sense of.

Thanks Eric Knisley for link.

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

In no particular order, but I have to say, of all the many old mining towns we've visited, Leadville is the sorriest.

The town has an incredible history, and still a lot of fine old buildings on the main street, but you can tell there's never been any zoning in the town and it just looks uncared for. Their water system is still affected by a Superfund cleanup attempt. The entry to the town is miles of debris and dumps and trailer parks, and the land is barren because it was over logged long ago and nothing grew back.



There are tourists in the tourist part of town, but there aren't many tourists and there aren't many restaurants either. Around dinner time we saw the same sorry group of folks crisscrossing our path, looking lost and hungry, wondering where they should eat dinner.

The favored spot had only one thing on the menu, beef filet, and some of the hungry ladies we talked to thought this was just the thing, because you told them exactly how many inches of filet you wanted and that's what they'd serve you. The image of the cook in the back room with ruler and giant slab of beef turned me off.

The sign in the window of the Chinese restaurant was peculiar- was it trying to be cute? Restaurant is hard to spell, so hmm...



Or there was the Italian restaurant and gifts-- the gifts part rang the wrong bell for me.

We ended up having our dinner delivered to us at the famous Silver Dollar Saloon-- slab of ribs and salad, though no utensils came with it which made it tricky at first.



This art gallery seemed completely out of place. The owner beckoned us inside, including Molly.



The artwork was really nice. I noticed that two different artists whose work I liked a lot both were favoring extremely asymmetrical compositions- one was doing pastels of horses in black and white where the horse was only partial and in a corner of the image, and the other acrylics that made me think of Albert Pynkham Ryder but again with the odd compositions where everything is happening way off on one side or the other. I didn't think it was right to take a straight on shot of the pictures, but maybe I should have.



I believe the second artist's name was Frank Sampson. His paintings are on the right.

(to be continued maybe)

Hey Trigger! Hey Roy!

A most amazing video, and Trigger even does some fancy dressage moves.

I used to love Roy Rogers so much when I was little. My grandmother had a batty, wealthy friend who'd come to visit each Christmas and tell wild stories. Some of them were true. We never knew which ones. Did she really own diamond mines in South Africa? Did she really own Roy Rogers, and Trigger too? Were there really tunnels under Smith College where girls met to kiss? (and then why did I end up there?)

For a while Roy Rogers had a big museum in a warehouse out in Victorville, Ca, in the desert. It was a wacky place and honestly didn't make you like him better. But this video is Roy at his very best.

Used Cars in Delta, Colorado

We thought these were movie cars as we drove through town but they're at a specialty used car lot. Colorado has a lot of time warp towns-- Utah even more.

I played with cars a lot when I was little because my father loved the Packards of the 1930s and we went to many car meets. I know all sorts of things about cars from the 30's that would stop any conversation cold.