I painted eight illustrations of contemporary fashion a few months ago. They're coming out in a fashion magazine called Hot & Cool, in the UK tomorrow. I've listed the originals on etsy just now: Take a look. This one's a dress by Christopher Kane.

Animation Jam

Andrea Edwards, an animation student at Vancouver Film School, made this cute drawing of "my world" as part of an assignment.  I liked it so much I made a painting based on it.

 I really liked the pants suit in the drawing but didn't catch the flair of it.

Then I painted it a second time, larger. Forgot to make it a pants suit.  If you click on the pictures you'll be able to see them better. The hardest part was painting my German Shepherd Molly- you'd think that would be the easiest!

Buy My Art!

I've set up shop at etsy, http://www.etsy.com/shop/funonmars and am adding new pictures frequently, so please stop by. Sorry, no refreshments!

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.

A Colorado Auction

A house down the road has been bank owned for a few years, and yesterday it was up for auction on the premises. So we walked down to see what a foreclosure auction was like.

The house looks better than the picture, but it does look like a mobile home, was built about 15 years ago by a scrappy couple who are long gone. The house has two front doors into the same room. ("Don't you be coming through my door bitch.") It sits on five acres with nice views on a steep hill.

When we got to the house only a security guy was there with his small dog. He offered us a free pen with the name of his cleaning company on it. After a while a real estate agent pulled up in his Range Rover with a golf theme license plate and a salmon golf theme shirt too. He had been the listing agent till the bank got drastic.

Then the auction group rolled in, in one SUV. They had gotten lost on the way. Three guys in white shirts and ties and a hefty blonde gal with a pile of papers. The auctioneer looked like Kenny Rogers with white hair parted in the center, show biz. Then there was a guy with an earpiece who seemed to be wearing a Bill Gates wig. , and a gnarly looking little guy: maybe he'd been a jockey, or in rodeo, or maybe a ventriloquist dummy? He stayed behind the car.

They asked us if we were there to bid? I said no we were there for free cookies. When the auctioneer plugged in his amp Jon said, "Is this going to be a square dance?" He said, "That could be arranged."

Since there was no one there to bid, it was time to get the auction started. They were allowing on line bidding, with a teaser minimum of $50,000, and warned the folks on line not to push that orange button unless you really mean it. There was no video of the auction, so the auctioneer got started as if he had a big crowd there, "I want to welcome you all, ladies and gentlemen," and rolled into that amazing monologue that auctioneers do.

They had one bid for $50,000, on line. Nothing else came in. The house across the street is for sale for a million and a half, also on five acres. Wow. The bank has the right to reject the offer, but it was pretty stark and surprising. They packed up and headed off to their next auction.

I haven't posted on this blog in more than a year. I like writing but I didn't like experiencing my life as possible blog material, and there's something uncomfortable (for me) about posting my dear diary life on line. But I thought I'd pop in with this one.

Goat Busters!

We flew up to Sacramento to see Dinah at Davis- loved seeing her stable too with horse Tia getting in shape after her colic surgery earlier this year and the goats as uncontrollable as ever.



Dinah's heading to Peru this summer on an Amazon research trip. We're headed to Colorado in the morning. Happy Birthday to all my friends whose birthdays fall in May (the majority of friends my whole life.)

(I just realized the title won't make sense to anyone who doesn't remember the tag line to Ghost Busters)

Food in Italy

Can you believe I asked Jon to take this picture but didn't go inside? "No, no", I said, "I just like to look." It's true: I love to look at nicely displayed bakeries and candy stores, especially when they use shiny printed tin or cellophane. Some of the tarts in this display have wild strawberries on them! Paradiso!

But what was I thinking "just looking"? Everyone talks about Italian food so what I say won't matter. I could never get past course two so never had any desserts. Heartbreak.

The last night in Florence I went into a really pricey chocolate store and ordered a very small custom box of filled chocolates, two of each, thinking if I liked the taste I'd share it with Jon. NO SHARE! I didn't eat them till I got home and they were exquisite. One had champagne inside that dribbled right down my chin. Another had an apricot inside with the pit still inside the apricot. I wish I could go back and buy one of everything in the store just for me.



These were ravioli. They made me feel like I was really small because they were such giant tubes, in a walled Medieval city. They were really good, just fennel and leek but they probably snuck some animal thing in there because they even serve salami at breakfast in the hotels we stayed in.



Such pretty lettuce. We went to a great farmer's market in Genoa for more "just looking." Genoa is a nifty place to visit.



Our last night in Rome we were sent to a restaurant by the hotel, (and that's not a good idea. There's some kind of kick back going on.) We were served this artistic starter, which was filled with a wonderful artichoke mousse, but then my main course, sea bass first shown to me on a big platter before anything had been done to it, (John the B?) was sea bass with cheese sauce which didn't seem very Italian and was a bit creepy.

Blogger seems to have a limit on pictures to post. I was an experimental eater in Italy: whatever sounded weird but within my range I'd order. Why not? After a very weird sea food pasta Jon stuck to tomato sauce. I think the dishes he ordered were probably tastier, but now I know what not to order!

The regional thing is sometimes claustrophobic but sometimes terrific. Anywhere in Lucca where you ordered bruschetta it came with gloppy chicken liver topping. EUW! In Genoa a wonderful artichoke quiche like thing was on all menus. (no spiky chokes.)

Loved that all our hotels served blood orange juice for breakfast, even if sometimes it seemed to be cut with Kool-Aid. Campari Orange is a wondrous drink in Rome and comes with a grilled cheese sandwich whether you want one or not.

Truly disgusting that horse is on the menu but they don't provide translation. Figured it out too late or would have definitely boycotted a restaurant in Rome where we had lunch twice.

So how's that for the uninformed traveler passing through one of the most elegant gastronomic areas in the whole entire world?

Worst meal? Pizza! Right outside the Vatican!

Fashion Statement

The oddest fashion we saw our entire trip to Italy was at the very outset, in New York. We wandered into a very popular "French" bistro in Soho, Balthazar. The food was good and the room was filled with good looking people, many of them waiting for tables. We sat at a tray sized table next to the bar.

"Waiter, there's a fanny in my soup!"

A blonde walked up to the bar with her friends and ordered a drink. Do you know what tulle is? That stiff fabric ballerinas wear that you can see right through?

This gal was wearing a beige tulle skirt cut all different lengths and sticking out in all directions. It had big GASHES cut in the back of the skirt. I think she was wearing a thong under it, but I didn't check.

Her rear end was almost on our table. I mean I could have poked her with my fork. On the top she was wearing a shawl made out of burlap, the fabric potato bags used to be made of. Her friends all looked stylin. She kept clutching at her shawl but honey that wasn't covering the part that needed covering.

It really looked like an outfit from a classic bad dream but she made the choice to wear it, and we had to look at it.

The Dogs of Italy

When I saw how welcome dogs are in restaurants and hotels, I was sorry we hadn't considered bringing Molly along. But not sure I could deal with a dog's jet lag as well as my own. "Sally, It's 2 am! Time for our walk!"



This ancient Roman dog is making the same gesture Molly makes when we're driving in the car and she sees a dog on the street. Dogs have been helping humans back to the earliest days and many artists honored them. This was in the Etruscan Museum in Rome. Now when Jon and I are driving in the car and we see a dog, we make the gesture too.

Most of the dogs in Italian art look like Italian greyhounds. Surprise!



This old dog lived in the Cinqueterre on the Italian Riviera.

I'm surprised dogs don't smoke cigarettes in Italy. Everyone else does.

In the Cave

You see so many pictures of Jesus in Italy that it gets on your nerves, even if you did study medieval art for 3 semesters. We needed something else. We were staying at a goofy hotel in Lucca where the three guys at the desk seemed to be Manny, Moe and Jack.

Anyway, I found there was a cave tour somewhere in the mountains and we took a drive, first to the beach at Montereggio, then up a road of many switchbacks to Grotta del Vento, not too far from Castelnuova. When the metal door slammed behind us on the cave tour, I wondered if my claustrophobia was going to kick in, but I remained at ease, and was so surprised by how the cave looked like the inside of someone's stomach. It was wet and oozing.

I've been really wiped out since our return. This morning I woke up suddenly when the bagel in my dream had a baby alligator stuck in the cream cheese. It was not quite 4 am. I meant to blog an orderly trip through Italy but that may never happen.

Mother's Day

Jon took this lovely picture in the courtyard of the National Etruscan Museum, in the Villa Giulia part of the Villa Borghese Gardens. Gone were the miserable shuffling hordes at the Vatican Museum, (which Jon described as the tenth circle of hell though Dante only knew 9!)

This museum was peaceful, nearly empty, and full of wonderful art by the Etruscans, an early Italian civilization about which much is not known, even now. They even had an alphabet that's never been decoded.








The image below is the style of art they're best known for.



Beautiful sensitivity to horse and riders' poses.

I called my mother the morning I got back and the S.S. Dementia had docked. "I'm in London," she said. "Where are you?" She was upset I hadn't gone to London to meet up with her and sounded very agitated.

This morning she didn't sound agitated, but she answered by saying, "Have you heard the terrible news?" "No, what?" thinking uh oh.

"The beads are missing, and everyone's in an uproar. Without the beads the race can't be run.
People have looked for them everywhere. They've even called in the FBI."

"It's like some cheap mystery novel" she added.

She had to get off the phone because she was off to New York, but she'd call me when she got there, around noon. I'll be at the races then, hmm, maybe I'm a suspect. I do have some goofy beads I sometimes wear to the racetrack . But don't tell anyone! Don't tell the FBI!

Veni Vidi Vici

In our house in Northridge, above the ice machine, there's a special feature pointed out to us when we bought the house long ago. It's a slide projector shelf set up so you can show slides of your travels when guests come for dinner, while they're still stuck at the table.

The Power Point presentation of its day.

"Hey, why's everyone leaving so soon?"

Faced with 600+ pictures from our trip to Italy I hope I have the good sense not to pull out the slide projector here on the blog.

We saw some great art, really great art, first in New York at the Frick and the Metropolitan, and then of course in Italy.


This parrot painting was in New York.

In Italy there are way too many paintings of John the Baptist's head on a platter. People, please! Or of Judith doing the same thing to Holofernes. Why did artists think this was something they should paint?

The platter paintings were especially awful because the whole concept of Italian eating in restaurants is based on course after course, platter after platter, and they never let you start with dessert so we never reached that course.



This was the only dessert we ordered during the trip, and it was at an obnoxious restaurant in NYC on the lower east side. The waiter was a bully and we only ordered this so called "Baked Alaska" because they seemed to have an "eat it or beat it" policy in effect and we wanted to yell at our friends a little longer. It wasn't really Baked Alaska which is meringue baked around ice cream but they can get away with calling it that because they're so hip and the restaurant is so noisy no one would hear you if you complained anyway.

The first picture is an Etruscan sculpture. More on Etruscan art later. No, you can't get up from the table. Sorry.

feelin like a zombie

Back from 3 weeks in Italy-- in L.A. and it's nice to be home. Molly's here too. I'm in a "don't operate heavy machinery" state of mind but couldn't resist posting that first sign.

We had a great trip and it really helped that I suffered through several years of Latin in junior high as language wasn't really a problem.

Just one story. We were really, really lost as we pulled into Nervi, and the highway exit was up so high it felt like the Wild Mouse ride at Wildwood, New Jersey. Jon said, "Go in that grocery store and buy a map." So I walk into the store, stand in line, and then in pidgin Italian I say, "I sell map of city."

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.

boodatude: yes

terrific post tonight by boodatude here.

Cool artists wherever you look: Cindy Hunt!

copyright Cindy Hunt
I got a friendly email out of the blue from Cindy Hunt, and took a look at her blog and her artwork and thought they were both intriguing and delightful, so here's an introduction. She lives in L.A. This picture is cut paper- ow- never felt that safe around exactos! There are so many talented women blogging and creating interesting artwork- the world has no idea!

Peach and Blessing

I've decided, reluctantly, to find new homes for my birds, and it hasn't been an easy decision. First I posted on a pigeon forum, and got some weird responses there, none of which really worked out.

So I took the craigslist step. The first week, just offering the least desirable set of birds, I got a flurry of emails from a guy who could barely spell and didn't seem to know where Hollywood was, much less Northridge. When I suggested a specific place and time to meet up he panicked, "not so fast!". Like we were going on a date or something.

So I waited a week and posted today. Here's one of the responses:

HELLO ! IS BIRDS STILL AVALIABLE ? I CAN PICK UP TOMMOROW MORNING & OFFER YOUR CHOICE SODAS THESE FOR MY RETIRE DAD HE HAD BIG AVAIRY IN BACK YARD IF STILL AVALIBLE PLEASE CALL 714-***-**** CELL. THANK MUCH.

PEACH & BLESSING

BENNY


the soda part really stopped me. But sounds like a nice guy and I wish him much peach.
another one:

hi
call me at
818
***-****
t-u
Yair

that one was formatted at extreme right of email in tiny letters. Anyway, later today a woman contacted me and I could hear birds in the background. She said birds are her hobby and she would possibly take them all. She's going to contact me tonight or tomorrow. She sounded really nice.

Her Inner Rin Tin Tin

When I was walking Molly this morning I came upon a trainer and his student. He was a boxing trainer and they were exchanging fake blows and doing the boxing dance in the grass. Molly did NOT like this at all. Her parents are both working police dogs.

I could barely pull her past these two guys. She wasn't growling but she was really concerned, as if she felt somebody needed to step in and handle this disorderly situation. "Woof, I mean What seems to be the problem here?"

I got a new camera, Sony's latest Cyber-shot, and am trying to make sense of it. It seems easier to understand than other Sony's I've had and dropped. It actually has a pet setting! That's what I used for this photo. No idea what it's doing for pets. It also has a smile detector.