Archive for April, 2008

Leah Hayes on Funeral of the Heart

Posted by admin in pop culture, sequential art on April 7, 2008

Back in AP art during high school in the mid-1980s, I vividly remember dabbling in scratchboard (according to m-w.com “a black-surfaced cardboard having an undercoat of white clay on which an effect resembling engraving is achieved by scratching away portions of the surface to produce white lines”) and completely screwing it up. So the fact that Leah Hayes created Funeral of the Heart, a 120-page book drawn on scratchboard, caught my attention (and earned my unceasing respect) rather quickly. Thanks to some assistance from Fantagraphics’ Eric Reynolds, I was able to recently email interview Hayes. Here’s part of Fantagraphics description of the book: “Hayes creates a world of unease and ambiguity populated by obsessive characters, forlorn animals, and mysterious, inanimate objects; odd occurrences, unnerving deaths and unconventional but genuine love bind these characters and their stories together.” In addition to some sample pages, Fantagraphics set up a Flickr slideshow for the book and also offered a 10-page PDF preview. My thanks to Hayes for the interview, and please be sure to also check out her musical projects, Scary Mansion and La Laque.

Tim O’Shea: What made you decide to work with scratchboard for Funeral of the Heart?

Leah Hayes: It happened by accident. I was playing around with Scratchboard at the time that Fantagraphics talked to me about publishing a second book with them. I had written part of one story just for fun, so I decided to go with it.

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Charlton Heston Deserved Better

Posted by admin in Film, pop culture on April 6, 2008

Charlton Heston is dead. But in some ways, once the impact of Alzheimer’s started robbing his mind, I dare say to some in his family his dying process had already begun back in 2002 (with his announcement of the disease).

I’m a liberal who believes in reasonable levels of gun control. So clearly, my philosophy is not in line with the NRA (which Heston led in the late 1990s). A man should be evaluated by the sum of his parts–as an actor Heston was in many classic films–made classic partially by his performances. As a private citizen, Heston served in World War II,  then in the 1960s he participated in civil rights protests (as evidenced here)–long before becoming more conservative and a Republican.

But of course, for every relatively nice Daily Kos diary post in tribute to Heston, there are ill-conceived, insensitive posts like this one. Mourn for the passing of Heston. You don’t have to agree with him completely, but one should respect his body of work as a whole. And one should hope that none of us or our loved ones are ravaged by a disease like Alzheimer’s.

I wonder and worry about the increasingly lack of civility on the Internet–like folks who choose to mock the dead. To paraphrase Joseph Welch’s comment to Joseph McCarthy back in 1954: “Have we left no sense of decency?”

I sure hope we do.

And I equally hope that Turner Classic Movies has a planned Heston marathon in the near-term.

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Art Hunting

Posted by admin in art on April 2, 2008

So I decided to see if I could find a good site to locate art in public places–or more exactly in my home state of Georgia.

As part of my search, I stumbled across this state government orchestrated Georgia’s State Art Collection. Apparently at some point, the state of Georgia had a Georgia Art Bus Program. Well that program ended in 1991 and now totaling around 600 works (“sculpture, photography, printmaking, painting, ceramics, jewelry, fiber and silver work”), the art (from folks like “Benny Andrews, Lamar Dodd, Cheryl Goldsleger, Roccio Rodriguez and Joseph Perrin”) is definitely worth checking out.

Wow, I never get tired of find ways that my tax dollars are spent.

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