Lecture, panel
Two days ago I stopped by Scott McCloud’s website.. He wrote Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, two amazing works..a huge influence on my own art.. Well, he’s in Chicago for a humanities conference thing. Today I went to his lecture at a library downtown.. I did not know that just before his lecture, there was another event: Neil Gaiman interviewing Will Eisner. When I got there Gaiman was walking around chatting and Eisner was still giving autographs. I got Will Eisner to sign the only thing I had with me, my copy of Understanding Comics..he signed it “understanding Scott.” After the lecture, I got Scott to sign it as well, and he got a kick out of it.
He intended to do a slide show type thing, but the library was not set up properly, so was without visual aids. At one point he remembered there was an illustration in Understanding Comics he could use, so he asked if anyone had a copy with them and if they could throw it up to him. So I did..he was a little surprised when my comic flew out of the audience and landed on the stage in front of him, but he went ahead and used it and people clapped..fun stuff.. Of course it was just after throwing the comic that I remembered it had Will Eisner’s autograph in there.
Tomorrow there is a panel with McCloud, Gaiman, Eisner, and Art Spiegelman (author of Maus).. I think I’ll try to get the rest of ‘em to sign Understanding Comics as well..
fest and Cornell
The Quad Cities juggling festival was on Saturday, and my friend Harper and I drove out there to meet up with other friends of ours and hang out.. We entered many of the competitions..all of which were endurance; everyone started juggling at the same time, and whoever lasted the longest won. I lost the three balls in one hand competition, and Harper and I lost the seven club passing one. Brian and I won in eight club passing. We also won the nine club passing competition..at first no one could tell if we or one other team had won, so we held a rematch between the two teams.. Brian and I clearly won that, and Harper made a little movie of it on his digital camera. We will try to put that up here, but we may have accidentally deleted it..
The festival show was terrible.. The emcee didn’t know what he was doing, and for some incomprehensible reason, the wanted him to do a bunch of filler.. (We could see no way in which any of the acts needed any real setup time..) Last year at this same indoor show, one member of a two person act set his face and the stage on fire.. This year they had those same guys come out and juggle water balloons as “punishment.” The act was boring…lacked any drama or direction or humor.. Harper and I complained to each other about that show for the entire hour long drive to Mount Vernon.
We visited Cornell, our alma mater… It was strange..everyone seemed the same, but the college had changed in subtle ways.. I juggled with college juggling buddies and hung out with old friends.. A good time.
Halloween
On Tuesday night Harper and I went to a goth fashion show.. It was a good time, and there were some scary people.. The first hour or so was just a dance to old 80’s goth music..(it’s amazing how old some of these people are..) Then the show started. There was no runway, just a stage.. Three designers were showing theis stuff that night, and all of the shows involved lots of choreography and performance. The first had people acting like army folk beating metal trash cans with pieces of wood, to music like Orff’s Carmina Burana, among other things. The second was my favorite.. A video screen at the back showed handheld shots of churches and graveyards..the first models had umbrellas with sheets of clear plastic hanging down around them…they’d come out of the umbrella, do some stuff, and then stand at the side with the plastic hiding them. Then other models came out with weird clear plastic whip-like things and lashed them around..threw glitter all over the audience…stuff like that.. The last designer’s show was the most elaborate, even including some fairly athletic dancers and choreography.. It definitely lacked the depth I’ve grown accustomed to seeing in all the strange modern dances my sister does..I wasn’t particularly impressed.
On Halloween night there was a large festival on the green island thing in front of my apartment. Red Moon Theatre set stuff up along three blocks, closed roads and everything. There was a parade and then everyone hung around out front listening to bands, watching a fire twirling show, and seeing other weird things. Harper and I took our picture with a spooky man dressed as Jesus..he only wore a loincloth. Afterwards he asked us to retie the loincloth…we managed to escape first.. Apparently everyone sat down to eat at a table several blocks long, but we had gone inside by this time.
