How to use this Page

The British Library, an institution based in London, England, has been hosting an Alice in Wonderland exhibit. The curators organized this program to celebrate the 150 year anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s beloved novel.

Some of the items on display include manuscripts, reviews, and a variety of illustrated editions of the book. The closing date for has been scheduled on Apr. 17, 2016.

Here’s more information from the organization’s website: “Although the story has been adapted, appropriated, re-imagined and re-illustrated since its conception, we are still enchanted by Carroll’s original, much loved story, which continues to inspire new generations of writers and illustrators. Come and see Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript with hand-drawn illustrations, alongside stunning editions by Mervyn Peake, Ralph Steadman, Leonard Weisgard, Arthur Rackham, Salvador Dalí, and others.”

“Animated cinema is the demiurgic art par excellence: matter comes to life and is transformed in the hands and imaginations of the creators. They, more than anybody, know about the secret life of objects.” This description, comes from the exhibition “Metamorphosis: Fantasy Visions in Starewitch, Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers,” now playing at the Centre de Cultura Contemporanea (CCCB) in Barcelona, Spain, and it's a good summary of the work of these four visionary animators.

Doodler Alan J. Hart has raised more than $4,600 on Kickstarter for his poetry project, Everything’s Better with Monkeys. The funds will be used to cover the cost of printing 500 books.

Hart has written a lengthy poem pondering about the adding monkeys to art pieces by René Magritte, James McNeill Whistler, and Vincent Van Gogh. To accompany each funny verse, he re-created these pieces with appearances from baboons, orangutans, and more. We’ve embedded a video about the project above. Here’s more from the Kickstarter page:

“The complete poem includes homages to famous paintings including Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory, Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and more. In all, more than a dozen classic paintings get the simian improvement treatment.”

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Tom Oreb is recognized by many as being one of the finest character designers during the Golden Age of Hollywood animation. Certainly, he was one of the most versatile. At Disney alone, he was the primary designer (or character stylist) of Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom, Sleeping Beauty, Paul Bunyan and 101 Dalmatians, among others. He also designed Tex Avery’s Symphony in Slang, Destination Earth for John Sutherland Productions, and the infamous “stylized Mickey” for Disney’s TV commercial unit:

Earlier in his career, Oreb had been one of Ward Kimball’s primary assistants on Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, Bacchus in Fantasia and the crows in Dumbo. A stash of his drawings from this era (1939-1941) recently turned up on the Hakes auction site. The drawings had belonged to Oreb’s first wife, Bonnie Barrett, who unbeknownst to all, had been alive until recently.

Because many of these drawings were done for his wife, they hint at their marital spats, albeit in humorous fashion. Another series of drawings alludes to Oreb’s love of surfing and beach bumming at Newport Harbor and Laguna Beach in Orange County, California. One drawing features a guest appearance by Salvador Dali, and another shows Oreb with his gruff supervisor Ward Kimball.

This week marked the 150th anniversary of the first time Lewis Carroll told the story that became his beloved novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. On July 4, 1862, Charles Dodgson (the author who would publish as Carroll) boarded a small boat with three young girls.

Here’s more from Brain Pickings: “Entrusted with entertaining the young ladies, Dodgson fancied a story about a whimsical world full of fantastical characters, and named his protagonist Alice. So taken was Alice Liddell with the story that she asked Dodgson to write it down for her, which he did when he soon sent her a manuscript under the title of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.”

In 1865, Carroll published his first Alice story. The Through the Looking Glass sequel followed in 1871. The two titles have spawned numerous adaptations and artistic projects. For instance, the video embedded above features  To celebrate, we’ve put together a list of five ideas on how to celebrate Carroll’s novels. (via The Huffington Post)

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Magician Brain Brushwood tells a story on his blog about talking to Teller of Penn and Teller and how Teller ended up responding to a letter he wrote when frustrated by his industry.  He’s talking magic, but isn’t that what we do, too?  I think you will find it good advice for anyone writing a book.

Here’s Teller:

Try stuff. Make your best stab and keep stabbing. If it’s there in your heart, it will eventually find its way out. Or you will give up and have a prudent, contented life doing something else.

Surprise me.

That’s it. Place 2 and 2 right in front of my nose, but make me think I’m seeing 5. Then reveal the truth, 4!, and surprise me.

Now, don’t underestimate me, like the rest of the magicians of the world. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that I’ve never seen a set of linking rings before and I’ll be oh-so-stunned because you can “link” them. Bullshit.

Here’s how surprise works. While holding my attention, you withhold basic plot information. Feed it to me little by little. Make me try and figure out what’s going on. Tease me in one direction. Throw in a false ending. Then turn it around and flip me over.

Read Rouald Dahl. Watch the old Alfred Hitchcock episodes. Surprise. Withhold information. Make them say, “What the hell’s he up to? Where’s this going to go?” and don’t give them a clue where it’s going. And when it finally gets there, let it land. An ending.

It took me eight years (are you listening?) EIGHT YEARS to come up with a way of delivering the Miser’s Dream that had surprises and an ENDING.

Love something besides magic, in the arts.  Get inspired by a particular poet, film-maker, sculptor, composer.  You will never be the first Brian Allen Brushwood of magic if you want to be Penn & Teller.  But if you want to be, say, the Salvador Dali of magic, well THERE’S an opening.

I should be a film editor.  I’m a magician.  And if I’m good, it’s because I should be a film editor.  Bach should have written opera or plays.  But instead, he worked in eighteenth-century counterpoint.  That’s why his counterpoints have so much more point than other contrapuntalists.  They have passion and plot.  Shakespeare, on the other hand, should have been a musician, writing counterpoint.  That’s why his plays stand out from the others through their plot and music.

Here is the link to read the whole letter:

http://shwood.squarespace.com/news/2009/9/21/14-years-ago-the-day-teller-gave-me-the-secret-to-my-career.html

Talk tomorrow,

Kathy

1 Comments on Words of Wisdom from Teller (Penn & Teller), last added: 3/26/2012