I'm guessing that a number of the photos here are of professional models, but the selection is mine, and I couldn't help myself.

DREAMER: "I turned to ask the man what I was supposed to be seeing, but he was gone. It looked like he'd escaped onto the roof."

DREAMER: "I turned to the window again and this time everything had changed. It was dark outside. Somehow night had fallen, and the impossibly thick and expanding glacier I'd seen out at sea was now right outside the window, slowly and inexorably pushing cars and debris ahead of it. At the speed it was going it would only be a matter of hours before the town and everybody in it would be crushed. "

DREAMER: "In a panic I shouted to a man who was on the phone nearby. Nothing I said seemed to matter to him."

DREAMER: "I called to an old woman too, and got big belly laughs in return. She thought it was hilarious."

PATRONS: "Hey, quiet down over there! If you want to shout, go outside!"



BAND LEADER: "Yes, why don't you go? Nobody wants you here."

DREAMER: "I knew it wouldn't do any good to argue, so I made for the stairs."

DREAMER: "On the way down it occurred to me that I might not be the only person who didn't know about the glacier. I thought I'd warn the other people in the hotel, so I frantically knocked on doors. One opened by itself revealing a fat man screaming on a couch. I tried to reason with him but the more I talked, the louder he shrieked."

DREAMER: "Another door opened into a room of people who appeared to be waiting for something. They were indifferent to what I said about the glacier, and seemed to resent my presence."

DREAMER: "Other people just stared."

DREAMER: "The final door opened and revealed...revealed what? What kind of crazy place was this?"

DREAMER: "Out on the street it was dark and there was snow on the ground."

DREAMER: "No use trying to get my car. It was somewhere under the glacier now."

DREAMER: "In the distance I thought I heard a humming and churning noise. I didn't pay much attention at first."

DREAMER: "After a while the sound was deafening. Holding my ears I noticed a shaft of light methodically zig-zagging its way over the sidewalk. When I looked up to find the source I saw it... a round, mechanical thing in the sky, with a searchlight in one eye. It scanned the street, apparently looking for people. I hid behind a pillar til it passed."



DREAMER: "It's a good thing I did because round flying things were soon all over the streets, incinerating every human who couldn't hide fast enough."



DREAMER: "As if that wasn't bad enough, groups of predatory human spotters began to emerge from nearby buildings and joined the hunt. Whenever they spotted a fleeing man they blew a whistle, which summoned the killing machines. How could people do that to their own kind?"

DREAMER: "I saw a group of men on their hands and knees looking at something, and ran over to them to warn them. I did everything to get their attention but to no avail. They were absorbed in watching something in the ice right under their feet."

DREAMER: "I looked down, and sure enough there really was something down there. I know it doesn't make sense, but there were...there were live women under there... and they were beckoning to the men on the surface. "

DREAMER: "These were no ordinary women. Most were stunningly beautiful and they flirted like sirens. A few had the sentimental appearance of beloved and long-dead mothers and sisters. Every man saw the unique woman that he yearned for."



Finally one of the men, unable to restrain himself any longer, reached out and clasped the hand of one of the women.



DREAMER: "He was immediately pulled under the ice and drowned..."

DREAMER: "...as I was a moment later. I remember looking up at the hole in the ice as my lungs filled with freezing water. As it always does in these dreams the hole filled with light as killing machines leaned down and watched me with impersonal interest. I guess with all that thrashing around I put on a pretty good show. "

DREAMER: "And that's it! That's the point where I always wake up. What does it mean? Am I going crazy?"

PSYCHIATRIST: "Crazy? No, no. Not crazy. We'll talk about it next week. I do have to remind you though, that the magazines in the waiting room are for all my patients, and if you continue to take them home I'll have to charge you for them."

THE END

BTW: Many thanks to the excellent blog, "Shadowplay," which is where I got most of these pictures.

Kali sent me this video (above)! What a pal! What a pal! Have you seen the George Liquor on a log that she's selling on her site? It's beautiful!

The older Liberace (above) looks a lot more normal. Plastic surgery?

BTW, this clip is really funny. If you're rushed, then start it at the 2 1/2 minute mark.

Who is this (above)? He has a wonderfully comic face (above) set off by a round, volumetric body and interesting vest wrinkles. Vests were God's gift to caricaturists, but nobody wears them anymore.

This (above) is A. J. Muste, a famous pacifist and thorn in the side of the Johnson Administration. He had a long, narrow head with a huge pointed nose, thick horn rims and a high, bread loaf fedora. This reminds me that most artists don't draw fedoras big enough. A good fedora always changes the head shape, always looks a bit too straight up and awkward.

Next I tried soups. Soups make good lunches, and are good repositories for veggies. I'd heat up Campbell's Chicken Broth, throw in some of those tangled bean noodles that look like birds nests, throw in spinach and Japanese pre-cooked fish or shrimp, and at the very end, toss in some hard-boiled egg slices. Delicious! Campbell's makes a good mushroom soup too, and into that I poured my usual mushrooms, veggies, fettuccini, and some cut-up boiled ham slices.

[I found it handy to always have mushrooms, celery, walnuts, ham slices, and fettucini around. They're good for adding bulk to almost anything you cook. I always have alfredo handy, too. Alfredo is fattening, so I only use it in small quantities, usually to ease the pain of eating vegetables that I don't like.]



Oh, and I took a liking to fennel (above). If you don't know what that is, it's the ugly white and green bagpipe of a vegetable that you always pass by in the supermarket because it looks so alien. It's a real Frankenstein monster of grafted elements: mild white onion-type mass on the bottom, celery-type stalks in the middle, and delicate little dill-type leaves at the top. I know that doesn't sound appetizing but, trust me, it tastes better than it looks.

How does it taste? Well, it's like a sweet, slightly licorice-flavored, extremely mild onion. It's not really an onion, but it looks and feels that way. It's very cheery and eager-to-please, and makes good filler in a recipe that requires bulk. I cooked it with mushrooms and shallots and added it to other things. It was great, but once again I ate so much of it that I couldn't bear to look at it for a while.

This brings me to the grand finale, where I reveal the most successful lunch recipe I tried during that time. Which recipe got the top spot? I hate to say it, but none of them. They were all too doggone tasty and fattening. I ended up gaining weight instead of losing it.

The only lunch I ate during those few weeks that was consistently delicious, dietetic, healthy and sustainable was.....drum beat, please.....good old American peanut butter and jam on bread or muffin, served with milk. Yep, that and nothing else. A popular hippie book called "Diet for a Small Planet" also recommends it. It's nutritious and you never get tired of it. Something in the chemistry of it makes it ever-green for your taste buds. It doesn't go with vegetables, though. I guess I'll have to save those for dinner.

So that's it for now...but I'll put on my mad scientist cap and keep experimenting.

...then, on the same shot you have someone step in front of the camera for an ultra close-up.

What I hate about these books is how it's possible to follow the directions and still not get the same result as the author. When it doesn't work, you have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what's wrong. I hate having to do that constantly. Sometimes the answer's buried in some other chapter that dealt with photographers' issues, and which I thought an artist like myself could skip. Very frustrating. Artists need their own book.

The most striking thing about these books is that the authors never thought to stick ordinary readers of the books in front of the program to see what problems they have. Of course that would be a big undertaking. Photoshop is a big, lumbering behemoth (above) of a program, and reader-testing every part of it could be a chore. Even so, somebody should attempt it, at least for the chapters dealing with the fundamentals.

It's that big, lumbering thing that I want to talk about here. I almost feel sorry for Adobe because every new idea they come up with has to be built mostly on existing architecture. That lumbering architecture is what they own, what they have unassailable patents for. If some third party comes up with something new, say an intuitive, drag and drop version of the same thing, then Photoshop is sunk.

Their answer to third party challenges has been to keep adding functionality to the hippopotamus that they already own, but how long can they continue to do that? What happens when their manuals are 2,000 pages long? Some simplifying revolution is bound to happen.

[NOTE: I don't wish the program was dumbed down, I just wish that it would do what it already does in a simpler, more intuitive fashion. That way I could learn the basics from a book and get on with my life.]

It's interesting to imagine what would happen if Photoshop decided to build a new architecture based on more current ideas. A lot of the new ideas are open source or have legally uncertain paternity. It would be hard to build something really big and exclusive on a mess like that.

It's interesting to see how many current non-Adobe programs also use layers and filters and all that. I wouldn't be surprised if Blogger offered some much simplified, open source version of some of that for free to its users. My favorite non-Adobe Photoshop-type program is Pixelmator, which is a sort of reduced Photoshop for mac users. It does some of what Photoshop does, but it appears to be easier to use and costs a tenth of the price. I say "appears" because I haven't tried it yet.

Here's (above) a nine minute video showing how a composite is done on Pixelmator. Compare it to how the same thing would be done on Photoshop. Pixelmator is so cheap that I assume it's based on open source. It shows how far open source has come in legally approximating what Photoshop does. It's only a matter of time before this OS method is merged with iPad-type drag and drop simplicity.

REBECCA BRANDYTHISTLE: (Leaps out from behind a curtain) "BOO!"

Let's start with the way Paul Moyse really looks. In the snapshot above his face appears to have two parts: a rounded, slightly squared-off top, and a weighty, imposing muzzle. The parts are unified by a big nose (Geez, I hope Moyse never reads this!).

Here's (above) Moyse's own caricature of himself. It's a great picture but, being a self-portrait, it attempts to flatter. The head is somewhat unified in design, and not so much in two distinct parts, as in the photo. A unified design is a sign of youth (I talk about this in my previous post on faces). The skin is also robust and tight, also a youthful characteristic. What the heck! When I do pictures of myself I always shave off a few years. That's an artists perogative.

Here's (above) another self-portrait. Wow! A terrific picture! It looks like something Virgil Parch might have drawn. You could say that the nose is too big and the eyes are too close, but it's so funny that it doesn't matter. Boy, if a drawing's funny, people accept it as an accurate caricature, even if it isn't.

Here's an interpretation of Moyse (above) by another artist, one that's more realistic (well, sort of). The eyes are just as close as in the previous picture but here they don't work. You forgive close eyes on a deliberately distorted picture, but on a more realistic picture like this, they seem out of place.

Another snapshot (above). Moyse's dome is round, but it's also squared off a little. The top of the head is de-emphasized and the wide-angle muzzle is thrust at the camera. .



Here's (above) a caricature by another artist that emphasizes the wide angle even more than the photo. The cheeks are less thick than his real cheeks, and the lips are bigger. You could argue that the top of the head might have been smaller, and more detail on the shirt might have been nice.

By another artist (above). The face has a puffy, bee-stung look to it, as if it's pushed out from the inside. The line work is beautiful, but the artist was so intent on capturing the puffy quality that he lost some of the likeness. As in the picture above this one, the dome seems to distract.

In general I think it's a mistake for a caricature to emphasize irregular puffiness, even if the subject really is puffy. I don't know why that is. It's a law laid down by Zeus, and we mortals would do best to follow it without question.

In a comment Niki mentioned that the puffiness makes the face look black. I never thought about it before, but I guess it does.

Here (above) the artist emphasizes the chin. Lots of artists do this, and I have to admit that the effect is appealing. It certainly helps in establishing volume and weight. Even so, it seems inappropriate to the subject.

Being a caricaturist can be scary. Sometimes you realize halfway through that you're starting to lose the likeness, but the drawing is succeeding on its own terms as a work of art, and it demands that you continue as before, subject be damned! You have no choice but to do that, but how do you justify it to the person you're drawing?

The hairy muzzle is given an emphasis that isn't in the photo reference, but it's done so well that you can't complain. The artist seems to be insinuating his own belief that facial hair is bizarre and unnatural, and I admire him for doing that.

Artists should insinuate their own opinions about the world into their work. That's because an artists first responsibility, even a caricaturists first responsibility, is to create a beautiful work of art that reveals something interesting about the natural world.

Then came a solemn time as the lights lowered and the men billed as the strongest in the world came on. Before they performed they strutted around the front of the crowd flexing their muscles for the ladies.