Famous After I Die “Artistocracy” Blog
Your Honor, let’s get real…
You’re not fooling anyone
That wig’s a bath mat.
……
“The world judgement ham”
is the lyric that I hear,
The [honey baked] Cult.
…
Oh, Rapturist clown,
You worship a mean, flawed God
Reset your Doom Clock.
…
A social comment:
his pinched face constipation,
through Pink Floyd’s Brit tunes.
…
Outrageous, madam!
Let’s not play with each other!
You, put your hand down!
…
Judge Dredd’s huge package
is where he keeps his gavel.
Sentenced to hard time?
…
This Haiku Wednesday is made possible in part by some old timey adult public domain photos. Please feel free to leave your own Haiku in the comments section. Let’s make this an open collaborative project of hilarity.
Maxell commercial!
Where’d you get all those phonebooks,
thy airheadish maid?
Oh homely princess
with ice cream scoop hat and long
Bassett hound lace ears.
Is your Schick on strike?
Yes, professor Wolfman Jack,
you wear kid-sized specs.
BigThigh McLargeHuge:
Your legs are in charge, but you
can’t outrun me, sir.
Aunt May’s high again.
I’m paging Jason Voorhees:
Please make lemonade.
Ruiner of souls,
Crispin Glover, is that you?
What is the product?
…
Future pole dancer
Wagon doll is dead
No clean pants – a skirt for Jim
Anne plots more murder.
I'd rather stab my eyes out.
Johann Heinrich Füssli's 1802 oil painting "Nachtmahr"
I encourage you to join in on the fun. Please comment your own haiku on this post along with a link to the related image if applicable.
Want more haikus? Check out these resources:
I’m often seduced by package designs. I’m a pushover for unexpected curves, thematic details, and bold design decisions. The M.O. of Apple (as in stock symbol AAPL) is that all of their iCandy products have a seductive minimalistic design, but great design doesn’t always have to be stark and simple. I see great package design everywhere… especially in liquor stores. I’m drawn to the creative shapes and incredibly effective designs that wine labels and vodka bottles have. I could dedicate a whole blog post to genius wine labels alone. That’s another day. Right now, here are a few designs I like:
With one sinister broken fork tine, it just says "Thanksgiving". I'd get a case of this to last for holidays to come.
A shape you can slip into a bookcase or briefcase or into your local library's night drop slot.
A bit phallic, but also a bit bong-ish...naughty all around and possibly a straight man repellent.
Aside from my liquor bottle fetish, I also really find perfume bottles to be objects of desire, looking sharp and pointy or jewel-like. Again, I could do a whole post on perfume bottles. (Digression: when I was four I would ask my Grandma if I could put on some of her “pume” – she always had a respectable and varied selection in her boudoir.) Well, here are a couple of my “pume” package design faves:
DKNY Be Delicious. I want to eat this. Keep away from children.
I've never found the antidote nor lost my love of the occasional dose of Poison.
This didn't have a name, but the peacock side of it catches my eye. It reminds me of looking and playing with marbles as a kid. Those were wonderous and youthful days.
Like a breakable lily pad, this one is pretty sparkly, and it may cut you with its sharpness. But there's so much prettiness...it would so be worth it.
But my package fascination happens with other items, too. I used to be enamored with Fiji’s square water bottle, but I would betray that design for this one by Evian, however impractical and heavy…and space-hogging:
Drinking water was never so hard to accomplish. Try not to drop it on your foot.
Per sojones.com, the following design was concept packaging created for Adidas by a Capilano University college student named Jenny Kim and I totally dig it.
These promise to make me fast. Fast like a Solid Gold dancer.
Same with makeup. I sometimes can be made to buy makeup because it just looks so damn good. I don’t currently own these, but I would if they were within eyeshot:
Well behaved women rarely make history...or sexed up package designs ; )
Fred Faruggia makeup. This would be either FUN or a NIGHTMARE to use.
Made by a Brazilian cosmetics company (Ducha) I'm not even sure what these are, but they look fun.
There are just so many great designs out there, I feel like I don’t even know where to begin. I guess this post will have to be one in a series of posts highlighting great design.
Other recommended package design-related sites:
I have a thing for clawfooted furniture. It is oddly escapist for me. It is in my remodeling plans, but I lust over the idea of having a clawfoot tub — a single slipper bisque beauty for my bathroom that I can sink myself into with a good book. Like the one pictured here:
I am lucky enough to own a unique piece of furniture-art that my talented woodworking dad made for me in 1995. A year before I graduated high school. He made it out of exotic woods and the top is a laminate set in Purpleheart wood. The seat is an old refinished piano seat and he carved for it clawed feet, whose toenails he painted to match the Purpleheart. This is where I sit and do all of my drawings. I love this desk and it has plenty of room for all of my tools – and I have many different tools and multiple light sources.
FUNNY STORY: Several months ago my niece was over for a visit. Her 2 year-old daughter, Sylvia, was with her. Sylvia was very curious and this was the first time she was able to totter around and explore our loft. She walked into the studio room where the desk was and then turned around and came out in a panic. She saw the clawed feet and thought the desk was a creature or monster and she was scared of it. I still laugh about that.
The other clawed foot craft that my dad and husband recently made is a wooden wine holder. I sketched out what I wanted and they brought it to life, using old hardware and some metal clawed feet.
There is something cool and creepy in anthropomorphic furniture, but it is a constant reminder to keep a vivid imagination. The Victorian era is best known for the “claws”…an irony in that cordial politeness and status quo were also embodied in this staunchly role-driven era.
Perhaps where there was repressed expression, the creaturelike details were a manifestation of feelings that couldn’t be verbally stated.
Illustration by Andy Elkerton
Allow me to introduce you to an uber-talented British children’s book illustrator, Mr. Andy Elkerton. By chance I came to associate with this artist through my husband’s snark-filled movie review podcast, Everyone’s A Critic (shameless plug) – as Andy is a listener and interacts with the EAC “community”. An ironic clash between hard-edged podcast content and the illustrations that whisper delicately of knights in armor, apes wearing bras, frogs eating cake and other imaginative visual delicacies.
I had a chance to shop-talk a little with Andy about his stellar work. From initial glances, the illustrations look amazingly smooth with airbrush qualities. This is because he creates them digitally, using a Wacom to do the virual drawings. Andy has a rich history of working in the field of creating computer-generated images.
These samples are compressed but I HIGHLY recommend that you check out the full size and high def versions of his amazing showcase at his website http://www.andyelkerton.com/
Illustration by Andy Elkerton
If you have kids, I think they would love to look at the fabulous images in these books. And you just might, too!
Amazon.com list of the children’s books that Andy has illustrated.
I will be the first to admit that, while an artist, I lack fashion skills. I tragically wear unflattering horizontal stripes, I wear my favorite heels until the heels themselves looked like a pack of cheese graters attacked them, and I wear (gulp) tennis shoes with my work clothes when I walk to work. Tennis shoes. Nothing frumpifies an outfit quicker. And I loathe the trends: skinny jeans, Bieber hair, sparkles, heroin chic.
Famous After I Die Art & Digital Blog 
Charlie Chaplin Makes Me Cry
In one of my graduate classes we examined the subtext of Charlie Chaplin’s films and the social commentary he presented in a time when it was rather risky to do so. We watched part of Chaplin’s Modern Times in class. I had to put both hands over my mouth to stifle the uncontrollable laughter I was gripped with during the following “eating machine” scene. Tears were coming out of my eyes and my husband, who was also in this class, just laughed at me as I tried to contain my hysterics. Imagine, a silent film causing me to laugh harder than I have laughed at a film in years. That’s what I call a great time-transcending comedic art.
We plan on walking over to Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center this week as I am in luck – Charlie Chaplin films are currently being featured.
The context of the clip below: the men are testing out a more efficient way for a factory worker to quickly eat lunch, to maximize productivity. This was blatant commentary on industrial working conditions and employee treatment during the Great Depression.
…
Modern Times Movie Plot
Modern Times portrays Chaplin as a factory worker, employed on an assembly line. After being subjected to such indignities as being force-fed by a “modern” feeding machine and an accelerating assembly line where Chaplin screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto pieces of machinery, he suffers a mental breakdown that causes him to run amok throwing the factory into chaos. Chaplin is sent to a hospital. Following his recovery the now unemployed Chaplin is arrested as an instigator in a Communist demonstration since he was waving a red flag that fell off a delivery truck (Chaplin intended to return the flag to the driver). In jail, he accidentally eats smuggled cocaine, mistaking it for salt. In his subsequent delirious state he walks into a jailbreak and knocks out the convicts. He is hailed a hero and is released.
Outside the jail, he discovers life is harsh, and attempts to get arrested after failing to get a decent job. He soon runs into an orphan girl (the “gamine”), played by Paulette Goddard, who is fleeing the police after stealing a loaf of bread. To save the girl he tells police that he is the thief and ought to be arrested. However, a witness reveals his deception and he is freed. In order to get arrested again, he eats an enormous amount of food at a cafeteria without paying. He meets up with the gamine in the paddy wagon, which crashes, and the girl convinces the reluctant Chaplin to escape with her. Dreaming of a better life, he gets a job as a night watchman at a department store, sneaks the gamine into the store and even lets burglars have some food. Waking up the next morning in a pile of clothes, he is arrested once more.
Ten days later, the gamine takes him to a new home – a run-down shack which she admits “isn’t Buckingham Palace” but will do. The next morning, Chaplin reads about a new factory and lands a job there. He gets his boss trapped in machinery, but manages to extricate him. The other workers decide to go on strike. Accidentally paddling a brick into a policeman, he is arrested again. Two weeks later, he is released and learns that the gamine is a café dancer, and she tries to get him a job as a singer. By night, he becomes an efficient waiter though he finds it difficult to tell the difference between the “in” and “out” doors to the kitchen, or to successfully deliver a roast duck to table. During his floor show, he loses a cuff that bears the lyrics of his song, but he rescues his act by improvising the story using an amalgam of word play, words in (or made up of word parts from) multiple languages and mock sentence structure while pantomiming. His act proves a hit. When police arrive to arrest the gamine for her earlier escape, they escape again. Finally, we see them walking down a road at dawn, towards an uncertain but hopeful future. (According to Wikipedia)
About Charlie Chaplin
(Born April 16, 1889 – Died December 25, 1977) In 1915, British-born Chaplin burst onto a war-torn world bringing it the gift of comedy, laughter and relief while it was tearing itself apart through World War I. Over the next 25 years, through the Great Depression and the rise of Adolf Hitler, he stayed on the job. … It is doubtful any individual has ever given more entertainment, pleasure and relief to so many human beings when they needed it the most”. George Bernard Shaw called Chaplin “the only genius to come out of the movie industry”. He co-founded United Artists with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith. This meant more freedom in producing his own films. His high-profile public and private life encompassed both adulation and controversy. Chaplin’s identification with the left ultimately forced him to resettle in Europe during the McCarthy era in the early 1950s. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Chaplin the 10th greatest male screen legend of all time. In 2008, Martin Sieff, in a review of the book Chaplin: A Life, wrote: “Chaplin was not just ‘big’, he was gigantic.
May 31, 2011
Categories: Cinematheque . Tags: Adolph Hitler, American Film Institute, Art, Chaplin: A Life, Charlie Chaplin, Chicago, factory worker, Gene Siskel Film Center, George Bernard Shaw, Great Depression, industrialization, Mary Pickford, McCarthy Era, McCarthyism, Modern Times, movies, Paulette Goddard, productivity, silent film, social commentary, United Artists, World War I, WWI . Author: Famous After I Die Art & Digital . Comments: 2 Comments