I am using the potatoes as stand-ins for Buddhist monks chanting “Om”. The giant potato “battery” is supposed to power a small MP3 player and speaker.

At the third week of July, I had the equivalent to Willy Wonka’s gold ticket in my hands; I had a 4-day pass for the sold out 2010 Comic-Con. Sadly, I had a bout of insomnia and did not sleep very much for a week-and-a-half! Friday night thru Saturday morning, I did not make it to bed.

I forced myself to drive down to San Diego on Saturday morning. I no longer wanted to go, but I did not want to waste the ticket and I had made the commitment to try to get some sort of radio show out of this year’s event, even if that meant meeting just one interesting person.

It was also an opportunity for me to try out this  “Guaranteed to Pass Emissions Test Formula” fuel additive from Autozone. I had paid my car registration fees and just needed to pass smog. You put it into a full tank of gas and it supposedly,

“…contains the maximum allowable cleaning chemistry to reduce carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and emissions. Cleans carburetors, fuel injectors, intake valves, and removes harmful gum and varnish deposits.”

(And I suppose, it dumps this waste into the environment or it leaves it somewhere in your car. My car stopped running completely last week and I suspect it had something to do with this snake oil.)

As a community service, I decided to pick up three strangers Saturday morning who wanted to go to Comic-Con and needed a roundtrip ride down from LA to San Diego. I have never done this before, but I found them off Craigslist’s rideshare board Friday night when I couldn’t sleep.

In retrospect, I regret the two anti-social early twenties college students from the Cal State LA area; to be fair, one was a UCLA student. I picked them up first and they immediately got in the back seat of my car and spent the rest of the trip huddled together, whispering back and forth. The third person I picked up was more what I was expecting. He worked for Disneyland, but spent all his free time hiking, kayaking, snorkeling, surfing, rock climbing, mountain bike riding, and enjoying nature in Southern California. He had an open and happy manner. As a man of action, he was going to Comic-Con on a shopping and celebrity-hunting expedition! He brought a camera and a costume! His excitement was palpable.

Once we got to the Convention Center, I dropped them off out front and found parking. I then took an hour-and-a-half nap in my car. Once in, I was so exhausted that I planted myself for the day in a front row seat in one of the half-dozen large air-conditioned conference rooms and did not get up until one-hour before the close of Comic-Con. I was in Room 30CDE. This particular room was where many of the Master Sessions were held. I caught the tail end of a Law and Copyright workshop given by Michael Lovitz (click here for his site and bio). While I did not learn anything new, he was an engaging speaker. His talk was listed as:

Comic Book Law School 303: Oh, And Another Thing…— Noted attorney Michael Lovitz, author of the sold-out The Trademark and Copyright Book comic book, returns to deal with the more advanced (and often complicated) issues facing the creative community, particularly in light of the ever-expanding worlds of new media. Creators aren’t the only ones facing potential problems and issues — publishers, distributors, retailers, and even the ultimate consumers can find themselves facing legal issues they never expected. Infringements, misuse, tarnishment, dilution, knockoffs, lawsuits, satires, parodies, fair use, blogs, podcasts, tweets, and cybersquatters are just some of the many potential problems that may arise once creative works and products become accessible to others. This session explores how copyright and trademark rights are enforced, how one’s legal muscles may be flexed, and what to do when finding yourself in a legal minefield. Plus, time permitting, discussion about recent legal decisions and pending cases that are likely to affect the field of popular culture and how they might play an important role in your creative and business plans. Note: The Comic Book Law School seminars are designed to provide relevant information and practice tips to practicing attorneys, as well as practical tips to creators and other professionals who may wish to attend.

Next came the high point of Comic-Con for me this year: Terry Moore (click here for his blog). I was not familiar with him except that I knew my roommate had just spent a few months tucked in her room reading his collected works that she’d checked out from the library. He’s the writer and illustrator of Echo (self-published on his own press – click here for a summary) and Strangers in Paradise (click here for a summary) comic book series. The later has an anthology.

His talk was relaxed, peppered with insights about drawing and developing believable characters and with a series of tangents that kept the room laughing. He also sketched under a digital overhead projector where his exceptional drawing ability unfolded on a large movie screen like stop-motion animation. He was working with humble materials, on bond paper with a mechanical pencil. He was drawing and free-associating, then erasing out, adding details and erasing out, morphing his characters’ facial expressions and bodies into different emotional states while he created an off-the-cuff narrative. His seminar was titled, “Drawing Characters with Character.” Here are some tidbits he gave that I wrote down. I bolded the ones that I liked:

• Everything should be able to start with a smiley-face.

• People get attached to one beautiful style, say drawing a girl, and then they are afraid to ruin it.

• Faces change over time. The face stretches and pulls and emotes naturally.

• If one eye is flat, the eyebrow is flat. If one eye is open, then the eyebrow is a little bit open.

• Don’t get in the habit of drawing off to the side. Get your head right on top (of your drawing).

• It’s all about the eyes.

• Most people have a little hunch in back.

• The arms of women are longer than the hands of men(not sure what he meant?). On women, the wrist comes at the bottom of the crotch and the hand is halfway to the knee. With males… shorter arms and hands come closer to the belt area.

• Suppose you want to draw a vampire, then
-chin down -hooded eyes -nose straight down
-on the nose, if you don’t draw the bridge, it looks better. Especially if you are going to ink it later.
-top lip more narrow; bottom lip more full.
-high prominent cheekbones point down to jawline.

• Just because you can draw it, doesn’t mean you should.

• (He demoed hair fullness vs. flat stringy dirty hair.)

• “The Other Eye” – You draw one gorgeous eye, then spend the rest of the day trying to match that eye.

• He does not use reference photos; he draws from memory.

• He says (drawing from) magazines (the figures) are all posed.

• (He demoed drawing the head looking up.)

• We tend to draw nostrils smaller than they are. Smaller looks better than they are.

• He goes straight to paper.

• The hardest thing to draw are two people talking for several pages. He’ll be cursing the writer who came up with this scenario.

• There are 44-basic faces. Then you just vary it.

• You draw a stronger mouth if the character is attractive.

• To make someone look unique, he likes to play around with cheek area. This is where we gain and lose weight.

• When the neck gets thicker, it’s an indication of Body Mass Index (BMI).

• Noses, knees and hands are hard.

• It helps to look at photos and life.

• Tracing, using a light box, is good if you want to keep details the same.

• One way to get a great drawing is to fix a bad drawing. If he’s not in the mood to draw, sometimes he’ll draw something really rough/badly. Later he’ll “fix” it. This to him is less intimidating than the blank page.

• He made reference to George Fifer stuff?, and Adam Hughes? (hyper-realistic?).

• He is influenced by his start in cartooning. He is a cartoonist and sees line, and not light and mass.

This was the description of the seminar Terry Moore gave:

CBLDF Master Session: Terry Moore: Drawing Characters with Character— Learn what it takes to draw characters whose distinctive actions define them on the page. In Echo and Strangers in Paradise Terry Moore has established himself as a master for expressing a wide range of emotions through his characters. Bring your sketchbook and follow along as Moore shows you the secrets of how to make your characters “act” on the page in this CBLDF Master Session. The original art from this session will be auctioned off on Saturday night in the CBLDF’s Art Auction!

Next up was Darick Robertson‘s (click here for his homepage) talk on Body Language in Sequential Storytelling, my runner-up favorite of the day. I thought this talk was geared more towards someone who has an intermediate to advance grasp of figure drawing and character concepting skills, someone who is ready to tackle nuance.

Like Terry Moore, he drew under the overhead projector and we watched him sketch his Wolverine character rather quickly while he gave his talk. It was humbling to watch him draw. He starts from the center and works out and draws a photo-realistic, fully rendered character with perfect proportions and shading.

What was funny to note is that he had the same complaint as Terry Moore, that the overhead projector’s camera/light was in the middle above the paper and they could not get “right on top” of their drawing. These were some of the tips I picked up from Darick Robertson:

• He talked about using body language to convey action and emotion. He said that what separates the men from the boys (illustrators) is the ability to convey a quiet moment naturally and neutrally(?).

• He talked about his character Wolverine in his relaxed pose. He starts with the head, centered in the composition. There can be a hunch to the pose. He pointed out that it’s good to lay down the structure.

• He also talked about creating private moments where the character’s mannerisms come out.

• He had a nice sounding line, “Action is chaos in motion.” (For some reason, it made me think of the aphorism, “Art is energy shaped by intelligence” -Gore Vidal)

• He doesn’t like “posed” shots. He advised us to go for more realistic reference material. For example, World Cup Soccer. He said that it’s the little subtleties that bring about a more realistic gesture, for example, the contraction of a calf. (He was pretty funny. He stood up on top of a wobbly conference table and modeled examples of “posed” and cliched super hero stances.)

• He conveys that Wolverine is short, just 5’3″, by giving him a larger head. By contrast, a taller character will have a smaller head.

• He encouraged us to try to see outside our imagination, and to use reality or the realistic to inform imagination for a more authentic result. He used the example of Dan Clowes (?) who he says is a master at capturing the mundane.

• He likes to pull the characters into his reality, and not vice-versa. He then told of the time when he won a Post cereal contest when he was very young by bringing the character Green Lantern into his kitchen.

• He stays “on model” by using action figures and little scale heads for reference. For example, for light and shadow and for coming up with shading.

• Sometimes, he poses in front of the mirror and has his wife take a photo so that he can see where the lighting falls.

• He observed that subtlety of body pose can say a lot about what is going on inside.

This was the description of his talk:

CBLDF Master Session: Darick Robertson: Body Language in Sequential Storytelling— Bring your sketchbook and learn how to express action, attitude, and meaning through your characters’ body language in this CBLDF Master Session. In his work on The Boys, Transmetropolitan, and Conan, Darick Robertson has had to express story through his drawings of a wide variety of characters. Follow along as he demonstrates how body language can add dimension to your sequential storytelling. The original art from this session will be auctioned off on Saturday night in the CBLDF’s Art Auction.

Next there was a writing seminar with Marv Wolfman (click here for his bio), a writer and editor who’s formidable background includes being Editor-In-Chief of Marvel Comic, Senior Editor of DC Comics, Comics Editor for Disney, a consultant for Warner Bros., the creator of such properties as: The Man Called A-X, Blade, The New Teen Titans, Spider-Woman and many others, being a writer for comics such as: Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Mickey Mouse, DuckTales, Wolverine, Star Trek, Wonder Woman and thousands of others, in theatrical producing: Elfquest (Co-writer, Co-Executive producer) and Final Fantasy (Development for Direct-to-Video Movie), in television working on: Superman (developed, story-editor, writer) and Transformers: Beast Machines (story-editor, writer), in TV animation writing Teen Titans, Transformers, Reboot, Godzilla, Superman, Batman, G.I. Joe, Spider-Man, Conan, My Little Pony, Fraggle Rock and many other shows, and writing/producing/editing for television, film, educational projects, novels, children’s books and comic strips, and winning an impressive list of awards.

Marv felt very comfortable in his Jewish identity. He imparted his knowledge in the manner that a caring father might hand it down to his children. He would probably make a phenomenal college writing professor. This is what I got from Marv:

• There are no rules in writing. Writing is an art. You can do something experimental, if you can do it well.

• There’s one rule: Get rid of anything that doesn’t further character or plot.

• He warned us, “Don’t get sucked into non-sequiters!” Those scenes should enhance or inform us about the main character.

• Stories need to function cohesively (my word).

• He asked, “What is a story?”
-Stories are always about people and never about a thing.
-They are always about going through a conflict, about failure and even repeated failure, until you reach the goal.
-They are about the realization of the character of the “final problem.”

• Scenes should be smooth and seamless transitions that lead the character to different needs and answers, until they get to their actual real need. Even if they fail, they have reached that conclusion.

• Failure is not anti-story. For example, Romeo and Juliet.

• Plot is different from story. For example, in Star Wars, the story is about Luke growing up and finding the force. The plot is about blowing up the Death Star.

• You’ll develop your theme as you work out your story.

• Story is about the character.

• Plot functions to tell the story. What you write must resonate with the main story or get rid of it if it’s divergent.

• Stories are not real life. They are a fiction telling us how we deal with problems. They are a contrived situation. Story is made up of incidents that ask us the reader to suspend our disbelief. It is the place where the not real must seem real.

• If a character is well-developed, they will tell you what the character won’t do. Avoid having characters act out of character unless there is a way that this pushes the story forward.

• He juxtaposed Western storytelling versus Eastern storytelling. Western storytelling is about pushing through.
1 – With Western storytelling, you set up your world and ask who is the character. You establish what they are going through so that the reader has some sort of a norm. You start as late as you can before introducing a bit of conflict.
2 – The “world” begins to change.

TO BE CONTINUED…

At the urging of a friend, I attended the BIL 2010 Conference. BIL is 3 years running and is usually situated near the TED Conference (devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading). The event is free and open to all guest presenters. Usually scientists, futurists, technologists, artists, venture capitalists speak on inspirational and oftentimes niche topics. Usually with a Powerpoint presentation up their sleeves. They are able to throw the entire conference for less than the cost of one TED ticket. Tickets to TED run around $6000. As you can guess, TED caters to millionaires, captains of industry, and invited guess geniuses and creatives. Fledgling BIL, doesn’t cater to millionaires and embodies a true DIY aesthetic.

This year the venue was the Museum of Latin American Art down in Long Beach which felt far to me, as I’ve fallen out of the habit of going to these events. I should mention that I was rewarded for venturing out as I was one of a handful of people who won a free palm-sized HD video camera compliments of Google, one of the sponsors of the event. It looks like an iPod with a lens mounted flush on one of its sides and a flip out usb plug. This one.

These were two of my favorite presentations at BIL.

The first talk of the conference set the bar pretty high: it was a Powerpoint presentation with video by Steve Jurvetson about his enthusiasm for model rocketry. His profile on Wikipedia reads:

He was a Venture Capitalist (VC) investor in Hotmail, Interwoven, and Kana. He also led the firm’s investments in Tradex and Cyras (acquired by Ariba and Ciena, respectively). Current Board seats include NeoPhotonics, SpaceX, Synthetic Genomics, Tesla Motors and Wowd.
…
At Stanford University, Jurvetson finished his degree in electrical engineering in 2.5 years and graduated #1 in his class. He then earned an M.S. in electrical engineering and an M.B.A., also from Stanford.

Steve Jurvetson has a blog at http://jurvetson.blogspot.com

My other favorite was the presentation by Brad Templeton, “Before the Robot Cars.” On the BIL website he says:

At BIL 2008 I introduced the future of robotic cars. But they’re still a decade away. This talk will focus on technologies that are on the near term horizon, or even available now. It will also outline new thinking in the design of transportation and energy based on modern computer technology that can be used while the people are still driving. I’ll show videos of cars today avoiding pedestrians and valet parking themselves, and simulations of intersections without stoplights taking us down the path to automatic transportation.

His bio on the BIL site hints at the big impact he (and the groups he’s represented) has had on shaping the nature of the internet, especially by fighting the good fight for our personal freedoms. In some ways, I think of the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a better purer version of the ACLU:

Brad Templeton has just completed a 10 year term as Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading civil rights defender in cyberspace. He is also on the boards of the Foresight Institute and BitTorrent Inc. He was founder of ClariNet.com, the internet’s first dot-com, rec.humor.funny and Looking Glass Software. He is also a panoramic photographer and Burning Man artist.

His photography is at www.templetons.com/brad/pano and his homepage is at http://www.templetons.com/brad.

The BIL website is at http://2010.bilconference.com

Unfortunately due to low energy and lack of time, I could only attend the LA Art Show for a few hours to grab this interview and have a quick look around on one of the days that this was here.

INTERVIEW:
My radio interview with Kim Martingdale (click here for his bio) and others is now up:

click here to listen

REVIEW:
My first stop was the live “graffiti” art in the entranceway. Three artists were simultaneously working on three large murals brought to the LA Art Show by the LA Art Machine Gallery curated by Bryson Strauss. World reknown artists El Mac and Retna collaborated on a monochromatic portrait of a Latina done in aerosol with text. Mear One was working on a deconstructed cityscape with LA’s Watts Towers in the background and a figure of a boy in the foreground with butterflies flying from his chest. Coffee was painting a cubist monochromatic piece.

Next I visited what was probably my favorite exhibit at the LA Art Show, a show called “Signs” (click here to read press release). Sundaram Tagore Gallery curated a grouping of Islamic artists. The paintings were heavily text-based because depictions of the figure are prohibited in that culture. What you have then is text used as a textural element in most of the pieces, text abstracted to symbols. Text sources could be anything from poetry to holy books. The alphabet and its forms was also emphasized.

I then stopped off at the Uruguay exhibit. This year’s LA Art show debuted their guest country program featuring Uruguay. Uruguay is the second smallest country in South America, but it boasts a healthy democratic government, high economic development with a high GDP per capita and the 47th highest quality of life in the world. It sits nestled between Brazil and Argentina and its art scene is world class. They did not have anyone English speaking at the booth so I was not able to interview them, but the artwork shown consisted of contemporary painting and installation work, with a video exhibit as well.

Sister Cities had an collection of artists work from sister cities of Los Angeles. Pete Sterns of London had a very calming color field piece which he rendered as both a richly pigmented painting and as a computer animation. Nori, an artist from Japan, had two paintings representative of “every city.” His work is heavily influenced by jazz.

The Luce Foundation, a photography incubator, curated the Group LA exhibit. The main video element was a series of slideshows from different artist of their neighborhoods.

Finally, I found myself at the cluster of Korean art galleries. My favorite Korean artist is Yong Deok Lee who is known for his concave sculptures. The images are carved into a flat plane.

(YouTube turned up a few examples which gives an idea of the visual illusion created of 3-dimensionality when the viewer walks around his pieces:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SaG271TqqE)

I was happy to see a new piece, an aerial view of a swimmer underwater.

PHOTOS:
I didn’t have much time to appreciate the artwork this year, but this is a small sampling:

[nggallery id=3]

A Whole Foods’ vitamins and supplements aisle. For me at least.

Fall of 2005, I was reading any literature I could find on Bach flower essences. For a certain audience, the lyric description on each brown vial speaks to the whole in a way that modern pharmaceuticals with their legal disclaimers and talk about neurochemistry cannot. Each vial contains a poem.

According to Edward Bach, there are 28 emotional states at the root of dis”ease.” His life’s work was matching each of these to a flower whose positive “energetic signature” promises to bring the suffering back into balance. Each vial answers the enigma of our emotional discontent with a poem. A few:

•Aspen  – Helps you when you feel fearful without knowing why. The fear is vague and unexplainable and may hunt you day and night.

•Rock Water  – Helps you when you expect too much of yourself.

•Wild Oat – Helps you when you are at a crossroad in life and are uncertain as to which direction to choose.

•White Chestnut – Aesculus hippocastanum – encourages a peaceful and calm mind when thoughts and worries go round and round in your head.

•Walnut – Juglans regia – allows you to make or adapt to major life changes and to fulfill your ambitions free from the influence of others.

•Willow – Salix vitellina – helps you to forgive past injustices and move on when you feel resentful and bitter.

Robert Niles at the online journalism Review has a good article arguing that freedom of the press should not be exclusive to approved journalists.

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/200910/1787/

He writes:

There ought to be no special class of citizen called a “journalist.” Anyone who does journalism, even if for just a moment in their lives, ought to enjoy the protections of the First Amendment when they choose to speak or to publish. Otherwise, we are ceding to unelected corporate employers the power to determine who gets First Amendment rights, or not.

In the 20th century section of the book, Eduardo Galeano mentions something interesting in passing.  Robert McNamara, the World Bank president who was chairman of Ford and then Secretary for Defense, has called the population explosion the greatest obstacle to progress in Latin America; the World Bank, he says, will give priority in its loans to countries that implement birth control plans.

The definition of a Mathusian Crisis from Wikipedia:

Malthusian catastrophe (also called a Malthusian check, crisis, disaster, or nightmare) was originally foreseen to be a forced return to subsistence-level conditions once population growth had outpaced agricultural production. Later formulations consider economic growth limits as well. The term is also commonly used in discussions of oil depletion.

Based on the work of political economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), theories of Malthusian catastrophe are very similar to thesubsistence theory of wages. The main difference is that the Malthusian theories predict over several generations or centuries, whereas the subsistence theory of wages predicts over years and decades.

An August 2007 science review in The New York Times raised the claim that the Industrial Revolution had enabled the modern world to break out of the Malthusian Trap,^[1] while a front page Wall Street Journal article in March 2008 pointed out various limited resources which may soon limit human population growth because of a widespread belief in the importance of prosperity for every individual and the rising consumption trends of large developing nations such as China and India.^[2]

Paul R. Ehrlich in his book “The Population Bomb” predicted worldwide famines. Ehrlich wrote that India “couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.” This was disproved just six years later:

However, the introduction of high-yield grains and improved techniques resulted in India becoming self-sustaining in cereal production by 1974…

From LifeSiteNews.com

ROME, October 13, 2009
The head of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) told a gathering of African bishops in Rome on Monday that the theories of Thomas Malthus, equating increased population with food shortages, are incorrect. In response to a question from the floor at the African Synod, Dr. Jacques Diouf said that “food security” is possible in Africa now without the reduction of population, if there is the political will to achieve it.

…

Infrastructural development, improved living conditions for farmers, irrigation, the increased use of fertilizers, building and maintenance of rural roads, availability of high-yield seed and seed quality control and certification, will bring Africa into the “Green Revolution” that has taken place in Mexico since the 1950s and Asia and India since the 1970s, said Diouf.

…

Diouf’s address painted a picture of hope for Africa, based on her increasing population. Citing demographic trends in his prepared address, he said that in the next 50 years, Africa will have a population of 2 billion “and will represent the largest market in the world.” Africa, he pointed out, has 80 per cent of the world’s deposits of platinum and manganese, 57 per cent of the world’s diamonds, 34 per cent of gold, 23 of bauxite and 18 per cent of uranium. This wealth of natural resources and human resources means that “Africa cannot be ignored in the economic development of the planet,” he said.

If Latin America, like Africa, is rich in natural and human resources that the people of those nations have not been able to tap into for themselves disproportionate to first world “partner” countries and if the Malthusian Catastrophe is a myth that has been disproved, what does this make of the World Bank’s ongoing demands for population control? Is it a racist policy?

It’s late afternoon and my first visit to the West Hollywood Book Fair. I park at the Pacific Design Center and walk over. I catch Jordan Elgrably of the Levantine Center in conversation with Reza Aslan and Tamim Ansary on Art, Politics and the Arab Muslim World. The kernel of the hour long talk was that art and music are building bridges to the “Muslim world” that politicians, humanitarian relief, etc have failed to do. There was mention of many rock/electronic bands I didn’t recognize.

Other highlights of the fair include seeing Bob Barker of the Price is Right.