Thanksgiving at The Jade Sphinx

It seems that I have penned a special Thanksgiving holiday note since the inception of this blog; but, somehow, I missed last year.  My diaries are currently in storage, and my memory is not up to the task of going back a whole 365 days.  What the devil was I doing last year?  So, now the pressure is on to be particularly memorable this year…

In reviewing what I wrote in previous years, I seem to always say that the country is in a perilous state, that things seem particularly dire this year, and that I don’t know how we’ll overcome it all.  But, it’s our responsibility to be happy, to be thankful, and to fully realize the quiet miracle of our lives every day.

Not doing that this year, and here’s why.

News flash:  we are always on the brink and things are always trending to disaster.  I’ll be jiggered if I’m going to haul that hoo-haw out again this year, because I think pointing out the negatives in our lives doesn’t do us a whole lot of good.  So, yeah, things are terrible, it seems no one is happy with the election (even the winner), and the world as we know it is changing so fast, no one knows what to hold onto.  It was much the same last year and will be much the same next year.  Been there, wrote that.

Instead, I’m going to tell you what I’m happy about. 

I’m happy to be an American, and delighted to now be a Californian.  We may not always be satisfied with the way our government and institutions work, but they do work and that is more than can be said of many countries.  The sunny little beach town I now call home after more than four decades in Gotham has reminded me again and again of the simple decency of most people, of forgotten arts of friendliness and neighborliness I had lost in the Big City, and demonstrated that nature has the upper-hand on us, and not the other way around.  I am surrounded by good people, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I am happy that I continue to be moved by beauty.  The dangerous thing about spending too much time with people who make a career of the arts is that one can stop feeling an emotional response to them.   I am delighted to say that I still gulp before masterful paintings, am still heady after great novels, and can laugh or cry at music.  (My taste tends to run towards the Great American Songbook, which always puts me in mind of Noel Coward’s wonderful putdown: Strange how potent cheap music is.)  I am delighted that this blog has everything from Michelangelo to Charles Schulz, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Finally, I’m glad to have faith in America and Americans.  Patriotism was never popular among most of my friends; any positive sentiments towards the country are mostly met with ironic dismissal or sneering condescension.  (A gift from the 1960s.)  But I think we are a great people, or, at least, we try to be.  I don’t know the future of our land any more than you, but I do know that Americans are capable of great things, great kindness, and unity.  That last quality – unity – has been in fairly short supply in recent years, but I think it will make a remarkable resurgence in the months and years to come.  We can but hope, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

This Thanksgiving, make it a point to greet your family, friends and neighbors as people, and not as units of some political philosophy.  Love and nurture each other, and remember to be kind and ethical.  And, finally, remember to be thankful.  Thanks for the many blessings in your life, the bounty of the world around you, and for the quiet, ineffable mystery of your own existence.

Billy’s Booger, A Memoir (Sorta), by William Joyce

This week, we look at some books that make for perfect summer reading, and we start with something special.  Any new book by author, illustrator, filmmaker and poster boy for high-spirited shenanigans William Joyce (born 1957) is a cause for celebration.  But his new book – Billy’s Booger, A Memoir (Sorta) – is sufficient for bursting out into song, headstands while doing a Tarzan yell, and unrestrained fits of the hokey-pokey.

Not that Billy’s Booger is your ordinary, wonderful book.  It’s snot.  It is something quite unique – an illustrated memoir by a master of the form.  In it, he chronicles his participation in a school-book competition, and includes his first opus, Billy’s Booger – The Memoir of a Little Green Nose Buddy.  In short, this is the portrait of the artist as a (very) young man, and provides an insight into the formative components that make up Joyce’s protean imagination.

The story does snot have many fairy tale elements, despite its very traditional beginning of Once upon a time.  Or, as Joyce starts his narrative, Once upon a time, when TV was in black and white, and there were only three channels, and when kids didn’t have playdates -- they just roamed free in the “out of doors” there lived a kid named Billy.

And we’re off for an in-depth look into the Joycean imagination.  Most books in Joyce’s oeuvre exist largely as showcases for his stunning depictions of glowing, nostalgic Americana.  Billy’s Booger, however, is different – it has the full complement of stunning illustrations (some, the finest of his career), but is more of a masterpiece of design than anything else.

Consider – Joyce includes his initial foray into book creation as a special insert into the book itself, published on different weight green construction paper (and printed in what appears to be white chalk).  In addition to that, Joyce reproduces the illustrative style of 1950s-60s hygiene texts, along with loose-leaf paper doodles, and also includes several loving homages to classic newspaper comic strips.  Nor does he miss an opportunity to display his obsessive creativity and imagination: the endpapers include schoolboy doodles of the most mischievous sort, including my favorite: Replace Hallway Floors with TRAMPOLINES – why has this not happened? 

Joyce fills the book with quotations of his many obsessions, as well as many of his early books.  In what may be my favorite illustration in the book, Joyce’s depicts his younger self creating his first magnum opus.  In the background, just perceptible, is the poster from the 1933 King Kong, one of Joyce’s seminal influences.  Nearby is a model spaceship in the mode of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers (Joyce’s sense of science fiction, like that of your correspondent, is locked in 1930s art deco futurism).  On his desk is a brontosaur that may well serve as the model for his later creation, Dinosaur Bob, and doodles on his desk bring to mind his most recent book, The Mischievians.

In other parts of the book, you will see references to his earlier works, including George Shrinks, Roli Poli Oli, and perhaps even a nod to his sometimes collaborator, Michael Chabon.  There is even a little doodle that will become the logo for his animation and imagination company, Moonbot.

And Joyce simply never lets up.  In those pages where he recreates classic comic strips, I was able to spot homages to Peanuts, L’il Abner, a gorgeous Little Nemo page, Flash Gordon (of course) and Dick Tracy.  It is in his affections and deeply-rooted loves that Joyce reminds me most, perhaps, of the late Ray Bradbury (1920-2012).  Like Bradbury, one of the great writers of the last century, Joyce wears his heart and his loves on his sleeve – which is perhaps where they belong.  It is not a fashionable way of looking at the world; and certainly the last thing anyone could ever accuse Joyce of was being “ironic.”  But it is honest, and sweet and boyish and … peppy.  I can’t read Joyce (or Bradbury, for that matter) and not feel young again, or at least young at heart.  If for no other reason, Joyce deserves a medal, perhaps with an oak leaf cluster, if they have one lying around somewhere.

More literal minded readers will wonder how much of Billy’s Booger is “true.”  Well what does it mean when one promises the truth in a memoir?  Is this the actual book Joyce created in his boyhood, reproduced here without editorializing?  Did he, in fact, have such a happy relationship with his principal?  (If so, Joyce was doubly, if not triply blessed.)  And … are these pages lit by the glow of personal nostalgia?

Well … what does it matter?  Billy’s Booger is thickly crusted with enough biographical data to have more than a kernel of truth, and this is the artist’s biography as he remembers it.  Perhaps, one day, there will be a full-fledged autobiography or third-person biography to enjoy in addition to the Booger.

In a culture that values its heroes and children’s entertainment when it’s “dark,” the wonderful world of William Joyce provides a much-needed corrective.  His world is a place of sun-kissed landscapes, mid-century American optimism, and unfettered fun.  His books are for very young children, very old people, and everyone and anyone in between.

For those reasons, and many others, the book Billy’s Booger is our pick of the week.

Working for Peanuts

Charles Schulz (1922-2000) wanted to be a cartoonist since his earliest boyhood.  It was his sole ambition, his dream, the realization of his best self.  And when he died, little more than 11 years ago, he had reached the pinnacle of his profession, his fame was worldwide, and his creation, Charlie Brown and Peanuts, were familiar to young and old alike.

I spent some time considering Schulz and his contribution to Americana while reading Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaelis (2007).  This is a densely packed biography, filled with exhaustive detail.  There was some controversy when it first appeared, as several members of the Schulz family argued that Michaelis misrepresented the facts to fit his central argument: that Peanuts was a thinly veiled meditation on the Schulz’s own life.  I would suspect, however, that the central point of contention is that the Schulz family expected a warm, fuzzy and nostalgic valentine, and, instead, got a balanced picture of the real man.

Before moving on, let’s address the question – does an artist reflect his own life in his art?  Perhaps not consciously, but yes, always to some degree.  If the role of the artist is reduced simply to “maker of beautiful things,” then the artist is fully half of the equation.  We often react to art without any real knowledge of the artist’s life, but knowing an artist’s background, life experience and historical moment provides insight into the finished work.  If Schulz’s first wife, Joyce Halverson, grew shrewish and withdrawn as Schulz ignored her in favor of his drawing board, then it does not beggar the imagination to see some similar tone or trace of color in the tense relationship between piano-playing Schroder and ignored Lucy.

And who was the real Charles Schulz?  Well, the 704 pages of Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography can be condensed into two words: he drew.  It is rare that any creator in any medium attacked his life’s mission with such monomaniacal zeal.  Schulz wanted to draw, taught himself to draw (with the help of correspondence courses), and spent the better part of his life at the drawing table, creating and populating his own world.  His achievement is a prolonged body of work dedicated to a single theme – as such, it is difficult to ignore.

Peanuts has been interpreted and re-interpreted endlessly over the last 50 years or so, and this is not a forum for a précis of his critical consensus.  However, I do think that Schulz revolutionized the “funny kid” comic strip by taking children out of the sandbox, and putting confused and conflicted adults into it.  These are children in name and conception only, and Peanuts works on two levels: comedy for the children and existential angst for the adults.  His innovation became diluted over the years as he allowed his characters to become pitchmen for everything from Met Life to children’s vitamins, but Schulz’s worldview can still be heard through his noisy commercialism.

Which begs the question … “is it art?” This must also result in the question, “is the comic strip art?”

I would say, unequivocally, yes.  (And here let me parenthetically separate comic strips from comic books.  Comic strips are often the work of one dedicated creator, or creative team, who guide their creations through decades of change and innovation.  Comic books, though occasionally of interest, are too often hack work of variable quality.)  There are few indigenous American art forms, but the comic strip certainly qualifies.  And while the comic strip may not quite reach the elevated levels of Fine Art, it is indeed worthy of sober consideration and appreciation.

Back in the Golden Age of American comic strips (starting roughly with Winsor McCay’s art nouveau Little Nemo and ending with the marginalization of the American newspaper in the 1970s), comic strips were printed in four colors, often in broadsheet (or full-page tabloid) format.  Working with so much space and with improvements in the color printing process, cartoonists during this period created works remarkable in tone, composition, color and design.  Giants -- such as McCay, Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), George Herriman (Krazy Kat), Harold Gray (Orphan Annie), Milt Caniff (Terry and the Pirates) -- consistently created work of great beauty and originality.

Charles Schulz was never more than an able draftsman, but he put his entire life into his work and made it unique.  As he grew older, his line grew wavy; rather than diminishing his style, it leant later Peanuts strips a certain wistful nostalgia.  He died the day before his last, original Peanuts strip ran in newspapers around the world.  His identification with his art was complete.