Design & Execution

My snail fallacy posts can get a bit abstract, so it's nice to have a project that brings me down to earth a bit, or, in the perspective of this drawing, to a hover slightly above earth. Buffalo Exchange and Beauty Bar Denver  commissioned this adjusted rendering of 13th Ave. as one side of a flier for a night of music involving one Garth , influential house DJ of Wicked San Francisco, and one DJ Nedza . Beauty Bar, besides offering a fine combination of martinis and manicures, provides the unique experiences of reclining in an actual 1950s hair dryer chair, and drinking at a counter underlaid with glittered emery boards. I'm not required to advertise here, but I couldn't help but take a few photos at the opening. Nearly all my work for Buffalo Exchange is referential, and this piece references a famous cover of the New Yorker, depicting New York, specifically, 9th and 10th Ave.s, as the center of the universe.  I felt well qualified to complete this i...

The argument  Ad Nauseum  is not that abdominal discomfort that often accompanies watching commercial television--but it's close. It is a strategy that involves repeating a conclusion many times to urge its acceptance rather than offering proof.  The term Ad Nauseum   means surfeit  to the point of sickness . For some of us, it calls to mind, unpleasantly, eating too much theater popcorn  and before watching the owl attack scene in the movie  Thrice Midnight .  With such associations, how is anyone sold on this fallacy?   I've encountered  Ad Nauseum  in three flavors: First, a brute pummeling of repetition, a.k.a. the supersoaker approach. Here I refer to your filibuster, your parental injunctions to pack an umbrella, and yes, your Hulu commercials that might, through sheer persistence, convince you to back up your files on Mozy. Second, the subliminal approach. Conclusions may sn...

The Argument from Incredulity (AFI): I cannot explain or understand this, therefore it cannot be true. The AFI is a reactive fallacy, an irrational form of rebuttal to opposing ideas. Arguing from Incredulity takes arrogance, gerrymandering the borders of possibility to suit an incumbent imagination. If it cannot fit my brain, it cannot fit the world, either --a solipsistic thought at best. A special kind of character fancies his brain larger than the world. That character is Vizzini from The Princess Bride . Vizzini: "He didn't fall?" Inconceivable!" Inigo: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Inigo wisely sticks to semantics in his response. Inigo dabbles a bit in wordplay, and knows better than to question Vizzini's overall strategy because, well, Vizzini is never wrong. Genius though Vizzini may be ("Ever heard of Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons."), his hubris and his intolerance for ...

Before I return to the snail fallacies, let me show a line drawing of the Red Queen from  Alice in Wonderland  for a quilt design. Cuddly, no?  I didn't ape any one popular rendering of the queen, though costumes are influenced by engravings of Queen Elizabeth I. Of course, I ran a background check on the Red Queen before starting. Behold: two red queens populate Lewis Carrol's/Charles Dodgson's literature. The Queen of Hearts of  Alice in Wonderland  is more obviously ill-tempered, given as she is to bellowing "off with their heads" and cheating at croquet. Of course, she's a dominant playing card, and an allegory to Queen Victoria of England. The Red queen in  Through the Looking Glass  is a chess piece who presents an exaggerated evolutionary hypothesis: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place," or that it takes a constant effort and adaptation to maintain a competitive position. Similarly, "Red Queen" marketi...

LD17 is my final full internal illustration for Lucy's Dance . I have only the epilogue insets and the cover to go, and of course a mystery bag of revisions to arrive from the cultural expert. But back to the illustration. The view echoes that of the opening illustration but is more contemporary, showing small, rectangular structures rather than the qasgiq huts. One of my favorite moments in illustrating Lucy's Dance has been when one student in Stebbins claimed he could point out the location his home on my drawing. Every structure shown here is based on a real one, or at least a structure that stood when my model photograph was taken, so I hope that similar moments arise for others. LD17's landscape is deeper into springtime than LD1, I assume because it took the village dwellers a bit longer that year to rekindle the tradition. Actually, I thought that a more colorful landscape would better suit the hopeful denouement. The whitecaps on Norton Sound are less rigid. The ...

LD16 shows Apa dancing with Lucy's makeshift version of the Yup'ik dance stick. I use the spine to bisect the image into a left page showing the present Curukaq festival in a gymnasium, and the right showing a past Curukaq occuring in a qasgiq hut in Apa's memory. The temporal comingling seemed appropriate in light of the Yup'ik cyclical conception of time, which would fold together past and present springtime festivals. I have drawn Apa's face slightly to the side of the spine to avoid interruption by the spine. You may notice that I have also shifted the dance stick to a lower position to prevent visual entanglement with the background. I encountered one problem: Apa faces away from the people behind him, partly so that he occupies the foreground (I'm hoping that readers assume that people surround him). Unfortunately, no matter how I drew him with his eyes open, he seemed to retain a look in his eyes that could be described ...

Although the comparison is not made explicitly in the story of Lucy's Dance , Lucy's gift to her Apa is a primitive dance stick, arguably the most important prop in the Curukaq dance festival. These words from the Stebbins Dance Festival book recall the role of the dance stick: "Holding the dance wands, the directors recalled remarkable encounters between humans and animals." "Each of the three (dance) directors held an eniraraun (dance baton, pointer), also referred to as apallircuun (literally, 'device for providing the verse'), a two-to thee-foot-long wooden wand that the directors moved in time to the drumbeat. Each pointer was decorated with feathers topped with down or rabbit fur that accentuated its movement. Carvers also sometimes appended small, wooden figurines. In some villages the wands held by the two outside directors had crosspieces. The straight central wand, trimmed with a wolf or fox tail, referred to the well-known story of a man wh...