I don’t see movies
or buy comics from
people who screw over
friends of mine.

Here’s how I imagine mi amigo John Shore’s personal workspace:
There’s a computer, there’s some standard tools of the writing trade (pens, note pads, etc.)…

…and there are dozens and dozens of open cans of worms.

John loves opening cans of worms, but he doesn’t always get around to re-canning ‘em before opening the next can.

As a result his blog has got oodles and oodles of fascinating topics, but just as you’re settling in to go through one thread in depth, John’s already opening a brand new can.

One of the most recent cans is this one.

The topic:
Porn.

It’s a topic with a number of facets to it, and as I don’t think I could even begin to do justice to it in a single post (no matter how lengthy!), I’m going to use this as a kick-off / touchstone for further posts on the matter.

In a nutshell:
Anti-porn speaker Dawn Hawkins recently flew on a flight where a male passenger sitting slightly ahead of her was watching what she considered to be pornographic images (she is unclear but I gather the man was either across the aisle or else his activities could be viewed through the gap in the seats ahead of Ms Hawkins).

While she identifies the images at first as child porn, she then walks that statement back, saying the Asian models looked as if they could be 14 – 18 years of age.  She doesn’t describe in detail what they were / were not wearing, but from her description of them wielding whips against one another it sounds pretty clear this was not an “all ages” video.

Let it be stipulated that I am a first amendment fundamentalist:
Unless it can be demonstrated in a court of law that something presents a clear and present danger to innocent parties, no artistic, literary, or verbal speech should be banned.

Let it be further stipulated that I also think
Ms Hawkins was absolutely in the right here
to be offended under the conditions described
and absolutely within her first amendment rights
as a traveler within U.S. airspace to protest
the man’s choice of public viewing.

She would have absolutely been within her rights to protest anything he was viewing that she would find offensive.  I can’t speak for Ms Hawkins, but if I was sharing a crowded public space with someone who wanted to enjoy pictures of infectious wounds, animal cruelty, bodily wastes, racist slurs, or other edgy material that reasonable people might find offensive purely on aesthetic reasons alone, I would suggest they show a little more discretion.[1]

But none of those things are necessarily illegal to view or possess within the U.S.[2]

As I posted above, from Ms Hawkins’ description I can’t be 100% sure the images in question were bonafide porn, but it sure sounds like they could be.  The man in question has exactly as much right to watch porn in public without criticism as Ms Hawkins has to travel in public without being exposed to porn.[3]

Which leads us to the central point of this particular post:  How do we define porn?

As a former professional pornographer[4],
allow me to offer this working definition:

Pornography is any artistic expression created and/or shared with the specific intent of generating sexual arousal in its target audience.

Artistic expression includes live spoken or sung performances, all forms of visual arts including photography, music including dance, drama including pantomime, and literature.

Specific intent means the person/s creating and/or sharing it deliberately wanted somebody to get sexually aroused when they heard / saw / read / experienced it.

Creators and distributors are not responsible for the pathology of their audiences,
however, and a work of art created / shared with innocent and/or non-sexual intent
might still inadvertently arouse some members of its audience.

An unintentionally arousing work of art that is shared by someone for the specific intent
of creating arousal in a third party becomes pornography when it is shared for that intent
even though it remains non-pornographic when someone shares it for non-sexual purposes.

Sexual arousal differs from titillation in this manner:
If a viewer sees an ad for pizza and thinks, “That looks yummy”, it’s titillation;
if a viewer sees an ad for pizza and picks up the phone to order one, that’s arousal.

A pornographer doesn’t need to know exactly who his audience niche is in order to create pornography; just the intent of creating something with the desire to stir arousal in somebody is enough.

We’ll leave it at that for today & pick up this can of worms again at a later date…

Image above is what got people all hot & bothered back in 1929.
Hey, vintage porn fans, ever stop to wonder if that might be grandma you’re jerkin’ off to…?

[1]  “Reasonable” being a loaded term.  I have vegan friends, and if we were sitting next to someone watching actual footage of some goober hacking a kitten to death, our outrage would be identically high.  If we’re sitting next to someone watching a detailed documentary on the operations of a slaughter house, my vegan friends might keep their high level of outrage, but mine would drop considerably; I’d think it was tasteless to watch something like that in public but I wouldn’t see anything legally wrong with it.  Conversely, documentary footage of wild animals preying on one another might also get a similar negative response from me, while my vegan friends may be more tolerant since it was showing animals in their natural settings and behavior.  Finally, a cooking show on preparing beef might still rank as high on the outrage scale to my vegan friends while I’d probably regard it as perfectly acceptable.

[2]  I’m allowing myself some wiggle room considering age of audience, whether actual crimes were being recorded, etc.

[3] Think about it, people…

[4]  Penthouse Comix, 1995

When the U.S. Constitution first addressed the issue of copyright, the world was just entering the mass-produced Industrial Age.  The clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 for those keeping score at home) sez:

“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

Originally copyright was limited to 26 years, with an option for an extension of another 26 years if the creator so desired.

The 18^th century legislators who drafted the Constitution clearly felt few if any creators would live long enough to see their original work go out of copyright at the end of 52 years.

Well, times and circumstances change.  For one thing people began living a lot longer.  For another, corporate “personhood” allowed non-human entities to lay claim to work they had no direct input to creating.

Now, the concept of corporations — the original concept — was not bad:
A business entity that came together for a particular purpose for a limited period of time.

And once that purpose was achieved,
the corporation was disbanded,
its assets distributed among the shareholders.

But as the eminent philosopher C. Lauper once observed:  “Money changes everything.” Corporations bribed politicians to change the law so they could stay in business forever, and could in fact expand into businesses far beyond their initial prevue.

Marx wrote of workers’ alienation in modern industry, but that’s nothing compared to the alienation suffered by modern shareholders.  Shareholders, who often have invested blindly in mutual funds that chase down the best return for their dollar, have no first hand knowledge of the human beings working so hard to pay them their dividends.

Since they have no direct link to any of the businesses the mutual fund invests in, they don’t care how their money is made so long as their money gets made.

Corporations, hearing only the relentless drumbeat of “more-more-MORE” from the mutual fund managers, use business practices that would make Morgan the pirate blush.

This means, for creative types, that once a corporation sinks its fangs into an intellectual property, it’s never gonna turn it loose.

Copyright meant different things at different times in different cultures.

Japan was notoriously lax bordering on the whimsical when it came to copyright enforcement.  For a long time, any recording released in Japan had only a 20 year copyright, then it became public domain.

As a result, big non-Japanese acts were loathe to officially release records in Japan.  In a compromise move, they’d go to Japan and record a live album at a stage show, which would then be sold in Japan.[1]

When these live recordings went P.D.  in Japan, the original recordings, still officially unreleased  in there, remained safely under U.S. and / or European copyright.

Of course the Japanese — and the Chinese, and the Indians, and the Koreans, and the Vietnamese, and the Thais, and the Filipinos, and the Malaysians (not to mention the entire Middle East) — pirated the ever-luvin’ s4!t outta everything, but those original copyrights remained sacrosanct.

Conversely the Europeans, in particular the French, took a much more respectful view of copyright re creators’ rights.  Creators might sell rights to their work, but that didn’t give the new owner carte blanche to do as they saw fit with it, nor could they profit off it without kicking something back to creators and / or heirs.

They also stuck an extremely lengthy term of protection on copyright:
The life of the creator/s plus 70 years before it becomes public domain.[2]

At first this seems like a fair idea, but it actually works against both the original creator and the culture at large.

At a certain point, ideas, characters, concepts, stories, and techniques need to be “released into the wild” to be used by the culture at large in such a way as to build off of them, to expand humanity’s cultural capital.

We do not forbid people the right to use vanishing points in their paintings simply because Filippo Brunelleschi pioneered the technique 700 years ago.

Likewise, a still living creator is not harmed if a work remains popular even after falling into P.D.

If anything, it’s continuing popularity only further promotes the creator’s work and career.

Irving Berlin lived long enough to see
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band” fall into public domain.
Some how I don’t think he missed any meals because of this.

But with soulless amoral corporations using their ungodly influence to guarantee more and more money for themselves, we now see ourselves in a media environment where there is no protection for the smaller creator.

If you don’t already have millions to prevail against an opponent in court, you won’t get any millions.

Q.E.D.

At the same time we can acknowledge that the corporations have spent a lot of time and capital promoting their characters, concepts, et al., to the public; it is neither unfair nor unreasonable for them to expect some return on their investment.

But when a corporation is the bogus “creator of record” for a work or character, when does said work enter the public domain?  When the corporation is sold off (if ever)?  But then the property is usually sold to another corporation, and the cycle begins anew.[3]

Copyright, as it exists today, is much too long.  It needs to be limited to a more reasonable period, say 50 years at which point it enters the public domain.

Corporations (viz. Burroughs and Disney and Lucas) frequently hold trademarks on specific character designs; unlike copyrights, trademarks are forever (or at least until abandoned).[4]

It would not be unfair to allow trademark holders the privilege of being able to advertise their product as the “official” version, while still allowing earlier versions to fall into the public domain & fair usage provided such works were noted as “unofficial”.

Such unofficial versions would not dent a major corporation’s revenue stream.  For one thing, if a corporation thought they’d make a buck off something, they’d do it:  Convention sketches, fan films, slash fiction, etc., clearly aren’t worth their effort.[5]

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[1] This explains the huge number of “Live At Budokan” albums.

[2] For a specific recording of a specific performance, copyright only extends 50 years, even though the underlying source material may stay in copyright much, much longer.  One could not remake a European film from 1960, for instance, without paying the original writer and director though one could show the original film without reimbursing them.

[3] The irony, of course, is that rarely does a P.D. work bring the new packager any significant reward unless and until a new creative spin has been put on the material; viz. West Side Story / Romeo & Juliet.

[4] Burroughs has trademarked the image of a nearly-naked-clean-shaven-white-guy-in-a-loin-cloth as Tarzan, even though the original books are falling into public domain.  Try making a Tarzan movie based on a P.D. book, however, and you will find ERB Inc. lawyers swarming over your creative assets.  One wonders if a drastic redesign / re-imagining of Tarzan would escape such legal scrutiny, say a naked bearded version of the character, or one where he wears some modified form of jungle fatigues.  Likewise, many of the earliest Mickey Mouse comic strips are now public domain; what if one filmed them in live action with human actors?  Points to ponder…

[5] Paramount Pictures and Lucasfilm and Stephen King have long since learned the wisdom of letting fans make films based on their properties so long as they don’t make money off it.  Good or bad, the final product only promotes the Star Trek / Star Wars / Stephen King brand, so essentially it’s free advertising.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that I’m a big fan of all things Sun Ra. 
Space Is The Place

Nor should it be too much of a shock to learn I like Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor.*

So it was a delight to find my peanut butter & chocolate,
as it were, mixed together not once, but twice.

Like all of Pekar’s work, it’s a true story, an act of personal journalism.

But it was interpreted first by Robert Crumb and then again by Joe Sacco.

As such, it’s interesting to compare the two.

Clearly the same story, the same event, the same personalities, but just as clearly, differences between the two versions.

This is kinda what I’m getting at when I urge people to re-read their Bibles carefully.

I believe more than ever that the Bible is True.

But I also know it has been filtered through human perspectives.

We have to take all that into account.

Acknowledging that truth in no way impedes the bigger Truth.

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*  Read the comic, see the movie

Pappy delivers the groceries!

He’s posted a page by page / script to art comparison of the Gardner Fox / Joe Kubert Hawkman story “Earth’s Impossible Day” from the 1962 The Brave and the Bold #44.

Heavily edited & re-written by Julie Schwartz, as you can see, but oh-so-beautifully drawn by Kubert!  (And the story of how he acquired the script is pretty amusing, too.)

If you like classic comics, give
Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine a look;
he’s got lotsa fascinating stuff!

Check out his work at Art of Mark Bryan

this is a combo of 2 posts from my previously imploded blog;
thanx to Flint Dille & Robin Enos for kickstarting this re-post

Jean-Leon Gerome (1824 -1904) was a phenomenally talented French painter who specialized in classical & Middle Eastern subjects.  He’s one of the “oh, that guy!” circle:  Artists whose work you’re already immensely familiar with, but who got bulldozed over by the modern art explosion of the late 19^th/early 20^th century.  Now, thankfully, he and others like him are being re-discovered.

Gerome had an eye for detail, a sly wit, and a vivid imagination.  His technique was (usually) impeccable (see below for the contrarian example).  He was also smart & married well:  His father-in-law ran an art dealership that sold rotogravures of Gerome’s works, everything from cheap postcards to expensive prints.

A lotta contemporary critics took a dislike to Gerome’s financial success, the same way critics today deride artists who make their money off prints, posters, & T-shirts.[1] They accused Gerome of cranking out art on just about every subject with an eye to turning into a mass produced commodity.[2]

And Gerome could crank it out:  The exact number of paintings, sketches, & oil studies he did will never be known, but it numbered in the hundreds.  And Gerome’s studies are often of equal quality to other artist’s finished works.

In fact, it appears he thought painting was too easy! So in his latter life he took up sculpting — and became a master in that medium as well!

I luvz me some Jean-Leon Gerome, but truth be told, there are paintings of his that cause me a bit of irritation.

As I said, he was fast, he was prolific.  He normally took great pains in the details of his work though often the final product was just an inventive mish-mosh of the purported subject matter; his Middle East paintings are all scrupulously correct in details of costume, location, & props but the final composition was…uh…quite imaginative.[3] (That being said, he depicted his Arab and African characters with accuracy, grace, & dignity, always as distinct individuals, not caricatures.)

The same may be true for his paintings of classic antiquity.  For the theater & movies, Gerome was the go-to guy when one had to depict ancient Greek and Roman eras.[4] He did an enormous amount of research, but again, how accurately did he put the pieces together?

No matter: 
Gerome pretty much defined how we view the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.

Like I said, I luvz me some Gerome, but there are three traits of his that I find irritating.

#1 (and this one is only partially irritating since it actually works about half the time) — he often doesn’t show the action, but rather the moment just before or immediately after.  Sometimes he pulls this off:  “Golgotha” is all the more powerful for the crucifixion taking place just off panel.  Other times it seems too coy for its own good (and, yes, Gerome could depict action very well).

#2 — he often “cut & pasted” characters & elements in his paintings in a way that pretty much tips off the fact.  And he’ll leave clumsy clues in, like a conveniently placed brick or footstool so that he could mimic the model’s pose perfectly rather than modify it to fit the scene.

#3 — for a guy with a sharp eye for detail, when he goes wrong he goes really wrong.  Here’s one of his more famous paintings, “Prayer In The Mosque”.  He used photographic reference to perfectly recreate the interior of the mosque, then blew it with the prayer rug in the foreground.

(This drove me nuts when I saw it at the Getty Museum exhibit on Gerome’s work.  The guards were eyeing me suspiciously as I got close to verify how far off his vanishing points were.)

Despite that, I luvz me some Jean-Leon Gerome.  Here’s to a great artist, a man born 141 years too early for PhotoShop!

Addendum
Swiping Across The Centuries:  Jean To Jack

When I stumbled across this cover illo of Springheeled Jack at John Adcock’s Yesterday’s Papers blog –

– I was struck by the similarity to Gerome’s “Duel After A Masked Ball” (1857).

I think the obvious explanation is that somebody in the production process — artist, writer, editor, or publisher — was familiar with Gerome’s work and swiped it was inspired by it to create this cover.

Many American pulps and comic books typically bought / commissioned striking covers, then showed ‘em to writers who had to come up with stories to fit them.

Was that the Springheeled Jack process?  I dunno, but it sounds logical.

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[1]  ka-CHING!

[2] D’uh

[3]  i.e., totally made up BS

[4]  Oddly enough, Richard Lester’s 1966 film, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, based on the Broadway hit by Larry Gelbart & Stephen Sondheim, may be the most accurate depiction of life in Roman times, even if the story itself is a broad farce.

Adventure, October 1948

1. Be authentic. The most powerful asset you have is your individuality, what makes you unique.  It’s time to stop listening to others on what you should do.
2. Work harder than anyone else and you will always benefit from the effort.
3. Get off the computer and connect with real people and culture.  Life is visceral.
4. Constantly improve your craft.  Make things with your hands. Innovation in thinking is not enough.
5. Travel as much as you can.  It is a humbling and inspiring experience to learn just how much you don’t know.
6. Being original is still king, especially in this tech-driven, group-grope world.
7. Try not to work for stupid people or you’ll soon become one of them.
8. Instinct and intuition are all-powerful.  Learn to trust them.
9. The Golden Rule actually works.  Do good.
10. If all else fails, No. 2 is the greatest competitive advantage of any career.

(courtesy of AIGA;
yeah, it’s for designers
but it applies to
all creative types)

“So think about this and ask yourself: What do you want to do with your time? If given long periods of it, uninterrupted, how would you choose to use it? Do you value the new car above the possibility of writing a novel? Do you want the life that the banker’s 6-figure income can provide, or the life of the painter who strives to create something of his/her own making? Sure, you might say that there can exist a balance of commercial success and creative freedom — and I agree, there can. But what I’m saying is that this kind of success is so rare that to bank on it is just plain dumb. So it’s up to you, as the creator, to choose early on what you can be happy with — money with little creative freedom, or less money and more creative freedom?” — Rina Piccolo