Your 15 Minutes Are Up!

I am beginning to think I must give the wrong impression to people, judging from the emails that I get in my inbox.

Aside from the ones telling me that I need to revitalize my “manhood,” reduce my home loan payments, and the never-ending ones from a rather scantily clad young woman named “Sparkle,” who wants very much to meet me online, I am concerned about the emails I get from people who actually know me!

This all came about one evening while I was checking my three email accounts, (yes, I need three email accounts, doesn’t everyone?), I spy one with a subject line that read; “You will love this!” Fearing that in is another email from Sparkle, I right mouse click the message to get the properties of the sender to make sure it is not from her, or a radical terrorist group whose method of bringing America to its knees is through corrupting Gmail accounts.

I see it is from one of my students, still vaguely apprehensive I open the message. The message simply states that said student saw this video and immediately thought of me.  Below the message is pasted a hyperlink in the familiar Bob Ross happy sky blue colored html-speak. I pause for a moment, considering if I should open this link or not, granted it did get past my security software, but then again can you really trust software that sounds like a drunken Scotsman…

I click the link and I am taken to the Mecca of the Damned – YouTube! There on the screen is a grainy pixilated video of a woman lip-syncing to Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” dressed like the pope. I am not saying I was offended, in fact I chuckled, and then asked forgiveness for my sins, but I thought why post this. I mean, her face was visible; she must want to get dates, go to college, get a high paying job, and to have a happy life, right? All of these things were now in jeopardy because she thought it was funny and felt that the world would be a better place by posting it on a site for the mentally challenged.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not against YouTube in principle, on the contrary I can watch clips from shows and films I remember from my youth, it is a great place to watch movie trailers to see if I really want to spend the price of my monthly rent on dinner and a movie. What does disturb me is that it has become the repository for those people that have no life, a vidcam and the burning urge to share their sad existence with the entire world.

 I miss the old days, (the late seventies and eighties), where such people were confined to shows like Montel, Jerry Springer, and the founder of it all Phil Donahue. Shows which the media now fondly refer to as Reality Television, proving that the media does live in an alternate reality. The only great show that was worth watching at that time was the Gong Show, a sort of spastic version of American Idol. These shows allowed those people you wouldn’t invite to Christmas or your child’s birthday party to achieve their, as quoted by the late Andy Warhol “15 minutes of fame.”

What is even more interesting is that they were paid to debase themselves on national television, (back in the eighties the going rate was $2000 for appearance on Geraldo).Imagine that, you would be paid a large sum of money to destroy your credibility as a human being! No wonder those types of shows are still on today. In today’s sagging economy, you could make your house payment by say, launching your child in a hot air balloon… nah, who’d pull a dumb stunt like that.

Anyway back to the “YouTube: Mecca of the Damned”. This site is the godsend for the people who missed out on the whole Gong Show thing, or maybe they’re the children of those people, (shudder). With the use of a low cost camera or vidcam mounted to the monitor, anyone can upload whatever they want! You can see a man singing in the shower, a dog that farts the national anthem, or my favorite the little child telling mommy how it will kick a monster’s @$$! (The last one was given legitimacy by being shown on America’s Funniest Videos). That kid is probably being scouted by the WCF as we speak.

Now all this sounds funny and whimsical, but I don’t think that these people have fully thought out this whole thing. Yes, you could make your career break like Katy Perry, or you can kill your career, hope for employment, marriage, etc, just as easy. Just imagine if YouTube was around 1998, “Sherman set the Way-back machine…”

You are sitting in the congressional hearing; President Clinton sits at a microphone facing the speaker of The House:

Speaker: “Mr. President, these allegations of your involvement with the young woman Monica Lewinski. Are they true?

Clinton: “Define what you mean by involvement Mr. Speaker.”

Speaker: “Let me show you this video we found on YouTube…”

Clinton: “Shit.”

 My question to these people is, “Have you ever considered your acts of stupidity and juvenile exposition can be seen by anyone at anytime!”Moreover, it never goes away unless you remove it from the web, (but then again the damage is already done, so what is the point really). I have a friend who is in Human Resources for a major studio in Hollywood, and she told me that they now check applicant names on YouTube, MySpace and Twitter to see if the applicant is right for their studio or for right for an opening at the local sanitarium.

 And it is not only the professional sector checking these sites, it is also the colleges and universities as well. Did you ever stop to think the reason you were not accepted at that Ivy League school could be that funny video taken while stoned at your friend’s high school grad party may not have been a good thing?

My point is this, today’s youth have grown up in a world where the 15 minutes of fame, is the Holy Grail to the easy life and piles of money; and they are willing to risk it all to obtain it. Thanks to the  short-cut-to-graduation school system, (where history is the memorization of dates, not to show us how our actions affected our future); they don’t understand the long-term effects of their actions. What seems funny today is not going to be funny in a job market tomorrow, and where only the smart are employed in high paying jobs, while the rest are working at Starbucks for minimum wage.

Barista: “What can I get for you…?”

Customer: “Hey, aren’t you the girl in that video singing “I Kissed A Girl” dressed like the pope?”

Barista: “Shit.

"What Next?" Panel Toons

This panel cartoon is from a series I submitted to a magazine. It still makes me laugh....

Here is another one that I got in trouble when religious co-worker saw it...

"But Their Mouths Move Funny!?!"

Teaching animation department at a California art school is a challenge; the day to day dealing with students who are right brain dominate, but logic impaired. Who consider Monster energy drinks, Doritos a well balanced meal, and who have the attention span of a fox terrier on Prozac.
There is one question I am asked on a regular basis, “Why don’t you like Japanese anime?” This question is second only to “Which end of the pencil does the writing?” and my all-time favorite, “You mean I have to actually draw something?!?” Trust me; I am not making these up.
The reason for the rather odd enquiring into my animated entertainment preference, and its persistently being asked, is four years ago, when asked the question, I stupidly answered, “Not really.” Like Bill Clinton’s infidelities, it has never been forgotten.
Now I understand that I am from a different era, and that what was entertaining for me is different from what the youth of the last 15 years considers entertaining. Being born at the tail end of the Baby Boomers era I grew up watching Bugs Bunny, Pink Panther, The Flintstones and even the first three seasons of Scooby Doo, before the formula writing plague hit. Come on, you knew who the ghost was after the first five minutes, you just kept watching because Daphne was hot. I just think that when a character speaks, their mouths should move correctly, don’t you? Come on, even Scooby Doo’s mouth moved properly, and he didn’t even speak English, “Raggy, oh Raggy.”

What I am getting at is believability. If you were in Starbucks and ordered your venti Caramel latte, upside down with an extra shot, no whip because it makes you feel bloated; and the barista looked at you, his mouth moving like it was on fast forward and the speech followed after he stopped, you’d be freaked out right? When I was a kid, my brother and I would get up before our parents and watch cartoons with the sound really low. The animation was so good you could almost lip read what they were saying. My ex-brother-in-law actually did this because he was partially deaf as a child and no one knew it. True story. If he’d tried that with an anime cartoon, he would have probably ended up talking like Scooby Doo, “Ray Raggy, where is Fellma?”
Beyond the mouth-moving thing, I think there should be a spark of realism to cartoons so we can relate to it, (But not too much, take the big hoopla in the 1970’s over cartoon violence, but that’s for another time). The point is that there needs to be something familiar so the audience can say, “Hey I can relate to that,” or “I felt just like that!” The situations should look familiar to us so we can laugh at them even after the cartoon has ended. Case in point; the whole jumping up and hanging in space for minutes on end with a 70’s disco light show going on behind the character while he swishes his weapon around like an angry marching band baton twirler. Could you really see this happening? If I was walking down a dark alley and a ninja, (they always hang out in dark alleys, didn’t you know that?); dropped down in front of me. Then before he attacked, jumped up into the air and hung there while a light show from nowhere began. I wouldn’t know whether to applaud, swear off drinking cheap beer from Bev Mo, or just walk away. Granted that when Wile E. Coyote fell off the cliff, his neck stretched out a bit too far, but hey, it was an exaggeration to elicit laughter, not an animator’s acid flashback.
Don’t get me wrong, there is some very good Japanese animation out there, and I have actually been amazed by the craftsmanship of them, even Disney has financed several and the quality is awesome. The stuff on television today is like the McDonalds of cartoons; looks good, but is bad for your brain and your colon. For me, cartoons need to be entertaining and not something that hurts my head to watch it. The classic cartoons of the 1950’s and 1960’s had good writing, clever dialogue and even bits of history thrown in, (I learned about gas rationing long before high school history class, take that anti-animation naysayers!), all subtly mixed in. When you turned off the set you felt like you’d just had a good meal but weren’t too full. Anime shows leave you feeling like you had a full meal, and then you’re thrown on a corkscrew rollercoaster, while a psychotic chimp hits you with a salmon. Fasten your seatbelts, keep your arms, legs, lunch inside at all times, and don’t mind the chimp.
Moreover, why are the anime cartoons so serious? You would think that since the Japanese command the majority of all products bought by California teenagers in the San Fernando Valley, they’d be happier. Especially if you consider that the California economy is the size of a small nation. The subject matter is too dark and sinister. What they do think is funny is just unsettling. Have you ever seen that cat-thing in the Poky-Mon show? Burr! I get the whole high-tech thing, it is the reflection of their culture after the Second World War, and since all art is the reflection of a culture, yadda, yadda, ya, but can’t they move on? Even during the same war, our cartoons were still funny!
I admit I liked the Macross series that hit American shores in the mid-eighties; the one where the motorcycles turned into battle-suits. I hear Toyota is actually working with that concept to help with American rush hour traffic. I wonder if it’ll come in a hybrid model.
Well I better get going; a student missed the electric pencil sharpener again and stabbed another student through the chest. Wait a minute; he’s jumping up …now he is hanging in mid-air… hey, where’d that light show come from?

Christy Brinkley

Style Experiments

Here is another experimentation with style. I have been getting into the "retro look" of my childhood. It is along the lines of Ralph Bakshi and the Terrytoon cartoons of the 60's.

Just to let the blog universe know that I am also up for comission work. To see more of my work vist the following sites: www.celticviant.devaintart.com or www.graphicsmash.com/index/flex_time.html

More new stuff. This one was prompted by hearing news of the passing of Steve Gerber; writer, creator of many of Marvels best selling characters, (Like the two shown above), as well as writing for "Batman: The Animated Series." He will be missed.