Miscellaneous

Reverend William D. Campbell 1924-2013

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willdcampbellby Jas Faulkner

The daily email feed from one of the local papers had two links to stories that showed the city’s religious past and present passing each other in ways that could be seen as fitting, if not entirely ironic.

The first headline, listed as a top story:  Southern Baptists Shrink For Sixth Straight Year. 

The second, which was tabbed under “City News” :   Rev. Will D. Campbell Dies At 88.    

The declining Southern Baptist Convention (or whatever it’s calling itself these days) might have elicited a sage nod from Reverend Campbell, followed by a pithy, decidedly un-PC observation about the state of the Southern Baptist church.  Campbell was nominally a Baptist who was equal parts Jiminy Cricket and a tenacious gadfly towards the conservative religious establishment.

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Bichons Frises–Love Them, or Love Them

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I want to hate Lucky. I really do. He’s a 20 pound hairy pee machine, whose obstinate nature will not allow him to do his business outside in the wide wilderness of a back or front yard, or even against neighborhood trees and hydrants. On paper, he looked perfect. An adorable 9 year old in … Read more

Typography: From Metal Bits To Bytes

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by Jas Faulkner

typo4It all started with one of those thrift store finds that moves you to dust off and rekindle an old interest. I was there to do my biweekly stuffed animal grab for Niklas Lidstrom -aka-  Destructo the Wonder Shih Tzu when I saw they had cobbled together roughly fifty dollars worth of calligraphy supplies into a ziploc bag and with the asking price of  five dollars.

This is probably a good place to hit the pause button and admit that I’m a big old typography nerd.  It was  a love of letters and alphabets of all kinds that pushed me to major in graphic design at one point in my overlong undergraduate career.   I am still a sucker for typography books and, like any good bibliophile, mourn my 80s’ era spiral-bound typo stylebook.

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I Learned Everything I Ever Needed To Know About Dealing With Jerks From Terry Gilliam

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by Jas Faulkner

gilliam3
This particular doodle might have appeared in an earlier script and was eventually featured as an animated bumper in “The Meaning of Life.”

Why do people draw in books?

A friend of mine borrowed my copy of  the script for Monty Python and the Holy Grail for a scene study class. She returned it with thanks but a grumpy rejoinder about the copious scribbling along the margins. After listening to more grumbling, I finally broke it to her that the bizarre creatures were actually printed in the book. They were the handiwork of the film’s animator and co-director, Terry Gilliam.

She had every reason to believe that the artwork was mine.  However, she had no idea that Gilliam, and for that matter the rest of the artists often still known as Monty Python, had been influences for decades. My father passed his adoration of the Pythons to me when I was stranded in a Tea Party Before There Was A Tea Party prep school in the midwest because his job demanded we live in The Breadbasket of America for a year. It was then that I discovered comedy was a way to stay sane.   Gilliam’s adorably demented creatures gamboled across every Monty Python book I owned.  Of course I copied him.

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Art And Prozac

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If  Van Gough had Prozac, would he have explored creative worlds only he saw? If Tennessee Williams had been born in a time where homosexuality was universally accepted, would he have poured out A Streetcar Named Desire? If Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, every other depressed tortured writer and artist  had Effexor, or Wellbutrin or any other anti … Read more