The current challenge word at sugarfrostedgoodness.com is “black”.
In the middle nineteenth century, Jack Black (no, not THAT Jack Black) served as rat-catcher and mole destroyer by appointment of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. That meant he was the head vermin exterminator, but he was a bit of a showman, too.
Henry Mayhew, founder of British humor magazine Punch, recalled that Jack Black (no, not THAT Jack Black) was “the most fearless handler of rats of any man living.” Proud of his profession, Black wore a wide leather belt inlaid with cast-iron rats. Black drove a cart with rats painted on the side panels. He would often stop his cart in busy areas of town for “performances”. He had a stage rigged on the cart, on which were cages filled with rats. He would exhibit the rapid effects of his rat poison, by dipping his hand into a cage of rats and taking out as many as he could hold. He would then administer his own blend of rat poison right into the animals’ mouths. However, his work experiences included a number of occasions when he nearly died from infection following rat bites.
When Jack Black (no, not THAT Jack Black) caught any unusually colored rats, he bred them, to establish new color varieties. He would sell his home-bred, domesticated colored rats as pets to well-bred young ladies to keep in squirrel cages. Beatrix Potter is believed to have been one of his customers, and she dedicated the book Samuel Whiskers to her rat of the same name.
Jack Black (no, no THAT Jack Black) had a number of sidelines beyond rats, including fishing (for food and supplying aquariums), bird catching, taxidermy and dog breeder.
The position of royal rat catcher disappeared in the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, THIS Jack Black was never caught.
from my sketchbook: diane arbus
Diane Nemerov was born in New York City into a wealthy Jewish family. Her parents were fur merchants. Her older brother, Howard, served as United States Poet Laureate in 1963 and again in 1988.
When she was 14, she met and fell in love with Allan Arbus, a photographer who would later abandon photography for an acting career. (He is most famous for starring as Dr. Sidney Freedman, in the television show M*A*S*H.) Diane married Arbus when she turned 18 and the two had a fashion photography business for more than a decade. In 1959 they ended their partnership and their marriage.
Diane began studying fine art photography. In the 1960s she worked as a photojournalist, received two Guggenheim fellowships and gained critical praise for her disturbing portraits of people on the fringes of society, such as transvestites, dwarfs, giants and prostitutes. Her more famous photographs include “Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park“ and “Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967“. (This photo is echoed in Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining, which features twins in an identical pose.) Her voyeuristic approach has been criticized as demeaning to her subjects. In an effort to dispel this image, Diane undertook a study of “conventional” people, including Gloria Vanderbilt’s infant son, future CNN anchorman Anderson Cooper.
At 48, after a period of depression, Diane committed suicide by ingesting a large quantity of barbiturates. Not convinced that the drug overdose would be effective, she also slit her wrists.
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Monday Artday: beatrix potter
The challenge at Monday Artday this week is “illustrate a Beatrix Potter story”.
Beatrix Potter was born in London in 1866. She was educated at home by a succession of governesses, and had little opportunity to mix with other children. Even her younger brother was rarely at home. He was sent to boarding school, leaving Beatrix alone with her pet animals. She had frogs, newts, ferrets, a bat and two rabbits. Every summer, the affluent Potter family would rent a country house. Beatrix immediately fell in love with the rugged mountains and dark lakes, and learned the importance of trying to conserve the region, something that was to stay with her for the rest of her life. From the age of 15 until she was past 30, she recorded her everyday life in journals, using her own secret code which was not decoded until 20 years after her death.
Beatrix began an interest in biology, specifically fungi. She was later one of the first to suggest that lichens were a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae. At the time, the only way to record microscopic images was by painting them, Beatrix made numerous drawings of lichens and fungi. As the result of her observations, she was widely respected throughout England as an expert mycologist. She also studied spore germination and life cycles of fungi. Potter’s set of detailed watercolors of fungi, numbering some 270 completed by 1901, is in the Armitt Library. She also lectured at the London School of Economics several times.
When Beatrix was 27, she sent a story about rabbits to the young son of her last governess. She was encouraged to publish the story so she borrowed it back and made it into the book entitled The Tale of Peter Rabbit. She struggled to find a publisher for it and eventually had 250 copies printed privately. A year later, Frederick Warne & Co agreed to publish 8,000 copies in a small format, easy for a child to hold and read. Beatrix was asked to re-illustrate it in colour. It was extremely well received and by the end of the year 28,000 copies had been printed. She followed Peter Rabbit with The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. The popularity of these and subsequent books rewarded Beatrix with a substantial income from their sales. She also became engaged to the publisher, Norman Warne in 1905, against her parents’ wishes. Their opposition to the wedding caused a breach between Beatrix and her parents. However, the wedding never occurred. Norman fell ill and died within a few weeks. Beatrix was devastated.
Beatrix eventually wrote 23 books, all in the same small format. Her writing efforts finally ended around 1920 due to poor eyesight.
This illustration is for Beatrix’s book “The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse”, written in 1910. It is the story of a fastidious woodmouse named Mrs. Tittlemouse. She obsesses over keeping her home clean, constantly sweeping and chasing out unwanted visitors. She is horrified when a big, sloppy, wet frog named Mr. Jackson enters her home looking for honey.
Look! I can do cute!
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IF: routine
Just a few years after his discharge from the US Navy, Leonard Schneider was arrested in Miami, Florida, for impersonating a priest. He had stolen several priests’ clergy shirts and a clerical collar while posing as a laundry man. He then solicited donations for a leper colony in British Guiana after he legally chartered the “Brother Mathias Foundation”. He was found not guilty due to the legality of the New York state-chartered foundation, the actual existence of the Guiana leper colony, and the inability of the local clergy to expose him as an impostor. He made approximately $8,000, sending $2,500 to the leper colony and keeping the rest.
Soon after changing his last name to Bruce, Lenny earned $12 and a free spaghetti dinner for his first stand-up performance in Brooklyn. From that modest start, he got his first break on the Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts Show, doing Bavarian impressions of American movie stars.
In the time when stand-up comics would come out on stage in a cute little suit and tell cute little mother-in-law jokes, Lenny Bruce was a trailblazer. His routines touched on previously taboo subjects, like moral philosophy, politics, patriotism, religion, law, race, abortion, drugs, the Ku Klux Klan, and Jewishness. His stand-up act featured lines like “If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.” No comedian of that time would dare tread near that type of subject matter. He appeared on the nationally televised Steve Allen Show, where he commented on the recent marriage of Elizabeth Taylor to Eddie Fisher by making his first line an unscripted ‘will Elizabeth Taylor become bar mitzvahed?’
San Francisco columnist Herb Caen was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Lenny, writing in 1959: “They call Lenny Bruce a sick comic, and sick he is. Sick of all the pretentious phoniness of a generation that makes his vicious humor meaningful. He is a rebel, but not without a cause, for there are shirts that need un-stuffing, egos that need deflating.”
In October 1961, Lenny was arrested for obscenity at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco. He had used the word cocksucker on stage. He was acquitted, but other law enforcement agencies began monitoring his appearances, resulting in frequent arrests under charges of obscenity. The increased scrutiny also led to an arrest in Philadelphia for drug possession in the same year, and again in Los Angeles two years later. By 1963, he had become a target of Manhattan DA, Frank Hogan, who was working closely with Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York. In April 1964, Lenny appeared twice at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, with undercover police detectives in the audience. On both occasions, he was arrested on obscentiy charges upon leaving the stage. Despite despite positive testimony and support from the likes of Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Jules Feiffer, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, William Styron and Dorothy Kilgallen, Lenny was sentenced to four months in the workhouse.
Lenny was arrested 15 times in two years. His performances were banned in Great Britian. At his first show in Sydney, Australia, he got up on stage, declared “What a fucking wonderful audience” and was promptly arrested.
By 1966 he had been blacklisted by nearly every nightclub in the United States, as club owners feared prosecution for obscenity. The less work Lenny got, the more he turned to drugs. His last performance was June 25, 1966, at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium, on a bill with Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. The performance was not remembered fondly by promoter Bill Graham, who described Lenny as “whacked out on amphetamines”.
On August 3, 1966, Lenny was found dead in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home. Lenny was lying naked on the floor, a syringe and burned bottle cap nearby, along with various other narcotics paraphernalia. Sportswriter Dick Schaap famously eulogized Lenny in Playboy, with the line: “One last four-letter word for Lenny: Dead. At forty. That’s obscene.”
Lenny Bruce paved the comedic way for George Carlin, Robin Williams, Chris Rock and many others. Thirty-seven years after his death, Lenny was granted a posthumous pardon for his obscenity conviction by New York Governor George Pataki.
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Monday Artday and SFG: olympics
The challenge word this week on both Monday Artday and sugar frosted goodness is “olympics”.
There are things I don’t like. I don’t like being manipulated and told what to like. The media in the United States has been manipulating and telling us what to like for years. The influence of the US media combined with the complacency and short attention span of the average US citizen creates an awesome power. Most recently, we, as a society, are told by the media to give our allegiance and adoration to Britney Spears, High School Musical, American Idol, Hannah Montana and countless others. We are guided, influenced and swayed to follow the every move of someone or something that the media deems “a star”. Sure, I know it’s not a new thing. I watched “The Partridge Family” when I was a kid. My female classmates in elementary school pored over Tiger Beat Magazine. And as the years go on, the manipulation intensifies.
I watched the Summer Olympics in 1972. In the years before cable television, we only received four channels, so there wasn’t much choice. The afore-mentioned Partridge Family was pre-empted, so we watched. I remember cheering that porn star-mustachioed Mark Spitz and his incredible swimming accomplishments. I remember my mom digging Mr. Spitz for other reasons, as highlighted in his famous poster. We marveled as deadpan Russian Olga Korbut executed impossible gymnastic routines. I also remember watching live coverage of the ominous horror as the Olympic Village in Munich was infiltrated by eight Palestinian terrorists. I watched the 1976 Summer Olympics from Montreal, where Romanian darling Nadia Comăneci simultaneously won the hearts of viewers and the highest scores from judges and made us forget Olga Korbut.
In between the two Olympics in the 70s, life went on. Regular television programming was resumed and interest in discussing the Olympics waned.
From 1980 until now, I have watched approximately three minutes of the Olympics. I thought about that. I have come to believe that the Olympics are much more popular in other countries than in the United States, much like soccer. The United States media attempts to whip up interest in the Olympics because so much money is sunk into it by advertisers and NBC. Unlike professional sports like baseball or football, where fans can follow a player’s career for years, Olympic participants appear in one (maybe two) Games and then retire from their sport. With each new Games, we are presented with new athletes and their stories about which we are expected to care. They are offered in such a way that we are told “these are the people you must watch for and care about.” We are commanded to watch sporting events that, aside from two weeks at the end of summer every four years, no one gives a shit about.
I have heard more stories about Michael Phelps’ facial hair and his daily calorie intake than I really care to. He seems like a good guy. I guess it’s a good thing that he can swim fast. I suppose winning eight gold medals is good. But he’s a swimmer! A swimmer, for Christ’s sake! A guy who swims in a goddamn swimming pool! He’s not a brain surgeon. He hasn’t cured cancer. And after his endorsements run out when the “next cool athlete” rolls around, he’ll be wearing a paper hat and asking if you’d like to try the hot apple pie.
The Olympic Games have grown to over 11,100 competitors from 202 countries. Have you been following the careers of these 2008 Olympic gold medal winners?
Samuel Sánchez
Masato Uchishiba
Satu Mäkelä-Nummela
Pak Hyon Suk
Chen Ying
Elena Kaliská
I didn’t think so.
The US Olympic Men’s Basketball team brought home an unprecedented nine gold medals between 1936 and 1984. In 1996, the previously amateur basketball team was comprised of the best-of-the-best of the NBA. They easily took the gold medal in Men’s Basketball. Yesterday afternoon, 2008 US Men’s Basketball teammates, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James giggled on the bench as they watched their team trounce the Australian team by 31 points. The Coubertin Medal is awarded to athletes who exhibit the spirit of sportsmanship. It is named for Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the International Olympic Committee, whose ideals are illustrated in the official Olympic Creed:
“The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”
The original ideology of the Olympics was noble. The current ideology of the Olympics is bullshit.
*Footnote: My wife is watching the Olympics as I make this post. They just presented a story during Women’s Beach Volleyball (Yes, THAT’S an Olympic event). The story told about volleyball team member Misty May-Treanor and how she brought some of her mother’s ashes (as in cremated) to sprinkle at the volleyball venue in Beijing.
I hate the fucking Olympics.
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IF: detach
All Brenda Ann Spencer wanted for Christmas 1978 was a radio.
That’s all.
Just a radio.
Her father bought her a rifle instead.
On Monday, January 29, 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer opened fire on children arriving at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, across the street from her house. She killed two school employees and wounded eight students and a police officer. Principal Burton Wragg was attempting to rescue children in the line of fire when he was shot and killed, and custodian Mike Suchar was slain attempting to aid Wragg.
During the six-hour standoff with police, she made such comments to police negotiators as “There was no reason for it, and it was just a lot of fun”; “It was just like shooting ducks in a pond”; and “The children looked like a herd of cows standing around, it was really easy pickings.” Brenda showed no remorse, no emotion and was totally detached from the incident.
When asked what drove her to this form of murderous madness, she told a reporter, “I dont like Mondays. This livens up the day.” Brenda pled guilty to two counts of murder and assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. She has been up for parole four times and has been turned down each time.
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Monday Artday: 1 character, 4 panels
The challenge on Monday Artday this week is “1 character, 4 panels”.
This challenge was posted on August 4 as a two-week challenge because the person who mantains the Monday Artday illustration blog was going on vacation. So was I.
So, I’m walking across Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim, California, with Pudge’s Mom and Captain Wow. We were headed to Disneyland. While walking through the tram and bus loading area, I asked them for suggestions for the challenge. Pudge’s Mom says, “How about a strip of photos from a photo booth.” Captain Wow, at the same time, says, “Ha! You should draw Mr. Potato Head!”
Instead of doing two drawings, I combined both ideas because I’m lazy.
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IF: sail
The challenge word this week on illustrationfriday.com is “sail”.
In Greek mythology, Charon is the ferryman of the dead. The souls of the deceased are brought to him by Hermes, and Charon ferries them across the river Styx, to Hades. The fee for his service was a single obolos coin which was placed in the mouth of a corpse at burial. Those who cannot afford the passage, or are not admitted to Hades by Charon, are doomed to wander on the banks of the Styx for a hundred years.
And then the ferryman said,
“There is trouble ahead,
So you must pay me now,” – “Don’t do it!”
“You must pay me now,” – “Don’t do it!”
And still that voice came from beyond,
“Whatever you do,
Don’t pay the ferryman,
Don’t even fix a price,
Don’t pay the ferryman,
Until he gets you to the other side;
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from my sketchbook: bob crane
In 1956, Bob Crane was the number one morning disc jockey on Los Angeles’ KNX-AM radio. He filled the broadcast with sly wit, drumming, and guests such as Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Bob Hope. Crane became known as “The King of the Los Angeles Airwaves.” With high ambitions, Crane pursued acting opportunities. He subbed for Johnny Carson on “Who Do You Trust?” and acted on shows like “The Twilight Zone,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” and “General Electric Theater.” Crane’s one episode performance on the “Dick Van Dyke Show” led to his recurring role as neighbor Dr. Dave Kelsey on the “Donna Reed Show“. Crane’s career was taking off.
In 1965, Crane was offered the starring role in a comedy pilot about Allied prisoners in a German P.O.W. camp, “Hogan’s Heroes.” Crane was nominated for an Emmy twice for his role of the wisecracking Colonel Robert Hogan. During the run of Hogan’s Heroes, Crane met Patricia Olsen (who used the name Sigrid Valdis). Crane divorced his wife of twenty years, and married Patricia on the set of the show in 1970.
There was another Bob Crane that was kept hidden from the public. Crane was obsessed with sex and with sleeping with as many different women as humanly possible. And in the way that some collectors amass stamps or coins, Crane took hundreds and hundreds of explicit photographs of his conquests, including snapshots of himself engaged in sex with these women. He frequented Hollywood strip clubs and topless bars and rarely left alone. Crane departed the “Donna Reed Show”, some say because of a sexually aggressive attitude toward his stage wife. Crane’s first wife and Patricia both turned a blind eye to Crane’s exploits for as long as they could. Crane actually had an affair with the two actresses who played Colonel Klink’s secretary (the latter being Patricia Olsen).
“Hogan’s Heroes” co-star (and future Family Feud host) Richard Dawson introduced Crane to video salesman John Carpenter who shared Crane’s interest in photography and, as it turns out, sex. Carpenter supplied early versions of video technology (including early VCRs), and he’d often participate in and film group sex with the women that Crane would meet.
In 1971, after six seasons, CBS canceled “Hogan’s Heroes”. Not wanting to let his career decline, he appeared in numerous one-shot guest roles on network series. He made two movies for Disney. NBC gave him another shot at his own series. That lasted three months. Crane purchased the rights to the play “Beginner’s Luck” and toured the U.S. in productions as its director and star. The play brought Crane to Scottsdale, Arizona.
On Wednesday, June 28, 1978, after completing an evening performance and signing autographs for fans in the lobby, Crane returned to his apartment with Carpenter. Before they left again, Crane argued loudly on the phone with Patricia. Crane and Carpenter then headed to a local bar, where they had drinks with two women whom they had arranged to meet. At about 2:00 A.M., the foursome went to a coffee shop. About half an hour later, Carpenter left to pack for his return trip to Los Angeles the next morning. Back at his hotel room, Carpenter called Crane one final time. Crane was considering ending his lifestyle of heavy partying, and during this last phone call, Crane reportedly told Carpenter that their friendship was over.
Just after 2 p.m. on June 29, Victoria Berry, Crane’s co-star in “Beginner’s Luck”, decided to drop in on Crane at his apartment. After her knock received no answer, she tried the door knob. It was unlocked and the door swung open. When she entered the apartment bedroom she stopped and paused. Crane was lying in a fetal position in the bed. There was a huge dark area behind his head with great sweeps of blood on the wall. His face was so badly beaten that he was unrecognizable from the left side. A video cord was wrapped around his neck.
Approximately 50 pornographic videotapes were found in Crane’s apartment, as well as professional photography equipment in the bathroom for developing and enlarging still shots. A negative strip was found in the enlarger, revealing a woman in both clothed and nude poses. Circumstantial evidence pointed to John Carpenter. Police officers who arrived at the scene of the crime noted that Carpenter called the apartment several times and didn’t seem surprised that the police were there. Further investigation revealed several blood smears were found in Carpenter’s car that matched Crane’s blood type. At that time DNA testing didn’t exist to confirm if it was Crane’s or not. Not enough solid additional evidence could be produced and the case went cold.
In 1992, fourteen years after the murder, the case was reopened. An attempt to test the blood found in the car failed to produce any result due to improper preservation of the evidence. At Carpenter’s trial in 1994, the prosecution showed a videotape of Crane and Carpenter engaging in sex with the same woman to demonstrate their close relationship. However, Carpenter was acquitted on a lack of convincing evidence.
Carpenter died in 1998. He maintained his innocence to the end.
Here’s Bob Crane – not being Hogan and not having sex.
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SFG: mischief
The current challenge word on sugarfrostedgoodness.com is “mischief”.
In Northeast Philadelphia where I grew up, as in most places thoughout the United States, the night before Hallowe’en was recognized as “Mischief Night”. In the 1960s, the time in which I grew up, the so-called mischief was usually of the “prank” variety and, for the most part, harmless. At sundown on October 30, some neighborhood kids would mark up car windows with a bar of soap. They would toss an egg or two at a random house. They may unload a battery of toilet paper on a neighbor’s tree, entwining its autumn-bare branches in yards of Charmin.
One year, my brother sat in the darkness of our yard, poised with the garden hose in his hand, waiting patiently and silently for those young vandals. A group of kids approached my dad’s Dodge Dart and my brother let loose his deluge. The kids scattered. I don’t remember our house being a victim for years after.
While innocuous hijinks were the norm in my neighborhood, across the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey, it was a different story. Beginning in the late 60s, things in Camden started to deteriorate. The Camden Fire Department started getting numerous false alarms and calls for trash fires. The seventies ushered in a period of significant civil unrest in Camden. The situation got dangerous for firefighters; people started throwing rocks and bottles at firefighters and their apparatus. This period of dangerous, at times riotous behavior spilled over into Mischief Night, which evolved into a much more destructive annual event. Every October 30th, hoodlums would do their very best to burn the city of Camden to the ground. Over 130 arsons were committed in Camden on the night of October 30, 1991. The next year, Camden started emptying the streets of potential troublemakers, busing thousands of teenagers to Halloween events outside the city. Camden officials also organized a massive police and fire presence, which along with a stricter-than-usual curfew, has helped tame Mischief Night.