Bull Market

“Life cannot be assigned a cash value because, simply, it is beyond value.

Yet the Golden Calf syndrome – assigning great value to metal and no value to life – persists in risk management, infecting not just theory but also practice. The record is incontestable. Again and again, market values, rather than human values, have dictated policy decisions.”

Jacques Cousteau. The Human, The Orchid and The Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World.

a nerd, relaxing

nerd

an enthusiast whose interest is regarded as too technical or scientific and who seems obsessively wrapped up in it.

 

 I’m immersed in re-launching my bookbinding business, nutting out the schematics for prototypes for new models made from bamboo, taking my plans for electronic books back to analogue and figuring out how they’ll be manufactured. So it’s to be expected that I fall asleep with visions of formulae dancing in my head. But I’ve had a lot of time recently to catch up on reading and listen to music and go to see works at art galleries. It’s been a long time since I’ve just followed my interests and goofed off without responding to reading and cultural pursuits with sketches and specifications for some kind of book or electronic device. Then I looked at the list of what I’ve been reading, seeing at galleries and listening to, and every single one of the artists is an engineer or have collaborated with engineers to create their works! 

Alexander Calder’s Circus is one of the wonders in my world: animals with bendy wire bodies and abstract fringes and button eyes that have more personality than National Geographic videos of actual animals. I found a wonderful Uncle Fester-ish photograph of him growling with one of the Circus Lions in a new monograph of his work. In an interview in the monograph he talks about studying engineering before becoming a sculptor. Marcel Duchamp said of him:

“Among all artistic “innovations,” that came about after the Great War, Calder’s line was so distant from any established formula that there was a need to invent a new name for his forms in motion: “mobiles”. Through their way of counteracting gravity by gentle movements, they seem to “carry their own particular pleasures, which are quite unlike the pleasure of scratching oneself,” to quote from Plato’s Philebus. A light breeze, an electric motor, or both combined in the action of an electric fan, can set in motion a series of weights, counterweights, and levers that draw unpredictable arabesques in the air, producing a lasting feeling of surprise. Once colour and sound join the party, the symphony is complete and all our senses are called to follow the invisible score. Pure joie de vivre. Calder’s art is the sublimation of a tree in the wind.”

A Day With Wilbur Robinson

A Day With Wilbur Robinson is sort of The Day The Earth Stood Still meets Leave it to Beaver, together with the book The Great Gatsby and things that happened to me when I was a kid. …

I wrote and illustrated the book “A DAY WITH WILBUR ROBINSON” in 1990. In many ways “Robinsons” is my most personal and favorite book. It combines elements of my own childhood in Shreveport, the Science Fiction movies and cartoons I loved and T.V. shows like “Leave it to Beaver”, “Lost in Space” and the matter of fact absurdity of “Green Acres”.

Disney Live Action optioned it several months before its publication and so the wild ride began. 

William Joyce

When I read William Joyce’s A Day With Wilbur Robinson when it was released in 1990 I had no idea it would eventually become a movie, but it suggested something cinematic to me, something alive in time. It was what I’d imagined as a child, my life would be like in New York. Everything came together, the screwball comedy sensibility, the fox terrier, the sweetly domestic experiments with science in the form of curiously sensible philosophical inventions. But mostly there was the music I’d heard from five or six years old and grew to love: Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, particularly.

In a children’s book William Joyce had written:

Suddenly the faint familiar strains of “Potato Head Blues” came wafting from the house.

“That’s it!” yelled Wilbur. “It’s Friday — Grandfather’s in his lab working with his dancing frog band!”

We rushed to the lab. Sure enough, there was Grandfather with his friends Mr. Ellington and Mr. Armstrong….

The next morning the whole family was out front waving good-bye and singing “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” just like they always do.

The music was just there in the book: not introduced opportunistically, as it would be on the soundtrack of a movie, underlining (or creating) a mood. The music was a part of the story, as if it were on the page.

I read an interview with William Joyce that said that his book was optioned by Disney BEFORE A Day With Wilbur Robinson was released, and the first director attached to and then removed from the project, well before he directed the Lord of the Rings trilogy, was Peter Jackson. The movie is a Disney animation, pitched towards the future, a Jetson’s like treatment that doesn’t grab me, even in the interests of curiosity, to see how the fox terrier character is developed. I had something darker and more retro in mind, something from the dawn of talking pictures, the sophisticated strangeness of a Preston Sturges movie. And in this movie Mrs. Robinson would be reading books that are partly electronic / partly organic with the music and the words just there, together, the electronic components introduced as unselfconsicously as a bibliography or a page marker.

My version of the “futuristic” A Day With Wilbur Robinson would substitute the sister  Blanche, who seems like she might have been a dancer with a Duke Ellington style orchestra, with an intelligently absurd and charming older brother who is a wild rock musician, and be played, in a cameo-as-himself by Benny Hotel, who inhabits and whose music describes, a world equally as inventive and compelling as Wilbur Robinson’s, and who has a family equally as vast and dear and smart and engaging.

The soundtrack for A Day With Wilbur Robinson has no jazz on it. There are a great many songs by Rufus Wainright.