WIZZARDS & WORRIORS

Shoplifting as a squashed, repressed, underdeveloped form of manifest destiny.

Another great Al Capp piece was posted on the ASIFA blog. (which is great, go look at it.)

"They always want me to say who is the best writer in America today, and I can't think of any name but Al Capp... One of the symptoms or diagnostics of literature should be that it is read, that it amuses, moves, instructs, changes and criticizes people. And who in the world does that more than Capp? I think Capp may very possibly be the best writer in the world today." -John Steinbeck, 1953

"Not many people know that I worked with Al Capp for a year at Terry-Toons on a cartoon adaptation of Fearless Fosdick. Capp is one of the great unsung heroes of comics. I've never heard anyone mention this, but Capp is 100% responsible for inspiring Harvey Kurtzman to create Mad magazine.

Just look at Fearless Fosdick- a brilliant parody of Dick Tracy with all those bullet holes and stuff. Then look at Mad's "Teddy and the Pirates", "Superduperman" or even "Little Annie Fanny". Forget about it. Slam dunk. Not taking anything away from Kurtzman who was brilliant himself, but Capp was the source for that whole sense of satire in comics. Kurtzman carried that forward and passed it down to a whole new crop of cartoonists, myself included.

Capp was a genius. You wanna argue about it? I'll fight ya, and I'll win." -Ralph Bakshi, 2008

"A youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism, or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler, and often with vegetarian leanings … with a social position he has no intention of forfeiting. … One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England."

~George Orwell

Berkeley, this is you. This is still Berkeley.


Oakland, this is you. (this Oakland died in 1982)


Oakland, this is you. (this Oakland died in 1998)

Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft. One of the first color 12" records i bought, which then became a staple of the dollar bins was "LSD IS THE BOMB by RADIOACTIVE GOLDFISH". This song remains iconic for me, & contains the same issue as when i first purchased it, which is that i love psychedelic culture on the personal level, but hate the mass experience, which includes the mind altering substances. I think acid is for losers, but i love the idea of acid.

I had a crazy dream last night that took place in a hybrid city mixing Portland, Berkeley & Oakland, in the future as usual. The cities had developed fully into these emasculated hipster hidey holes, where all the guys had light beards, buddy holly glasses, light-weight checkered shirts & skater shoes. I don't remember any girls anywhere. Anyhow, there was some sort of comic convention i was a guest speaker at, where i had caused some kind of a stir with my insistence of comics being for kids, comics being an essentially vulgar art form & that real comic artists smoke cigars, swear, box & scare most mothers. To prove this, when some famous cartoonist who did not embody these ideals made his appearance at the convention dressed as Indiana Jones, i grabbed him by his prosthetic chest hair, broke his nose, smashed him into a wall & proceeded to kick the shit out of him while he was lying on the ground in shock. Jesse Reklaw who was an organizer of the event ran up & looked very shocked & disappointed in me. The teeming hordes of estrogenated comic artists & fans realized that i was their salvation in this life & began chanting various slogans i had come up with on the fly during my speech. They were getting very wild & i had a hard time watching their new-found cultish obsession with my teachings so i wandered the streets of this town, noting that an old shopping mall (the one on MacArthur & Broadway in Oakland) had been developed into an amusement park. While trying to find where i was supposed to stay that night, i found that Ryohei Tanaka was also a guest of the comic convention, but that he had become so insecure about his work that he was throwing it out of his shabby hotel window in a drunken state. Realizing that this guy's art could be worth quite a bit of money in the future (& that i just plain like the stuff), i collected about 20 pieces in broken frames & continued walking around. Soon i was driving in a neighborhood not unlike the Upper Haight & was stopped at a random urine test road block run by police who had taken to dressing like environmental signature collection volunteers & with a similar "hey bro" demeanor. I had to find a good place to urinate into the cup they gave me, & that's when all the girls of the city started showing up & the flood lights went on. I woke up & had to take a leak before changing Henry's diaper & burping him.

This PSA confirmed all of my suspicions about the current political state of affairs, as well as my understanding of "Man-Made" Global Warming.



More evidence!

It's kind of crazy to think about, but at the same time, it's only natural. I've got two sons!
Rome was not built in a day
Opposition will come your way
But the hotter the battle you see
It's the sweeter the victory, now

You know what is some bullshit? The Adbusters mentality. See, i just signed up on Facebook because i see a migration towards that & i want to see if it has any usefulness to it. I tried Friendster when that first came out but it was such a dull deal, really lame. Then MYSPACE came out & i actually like myspace quite a bit. So, i hear people complain about all the flashing ads on myspace & all the insane html & the trashy photoshop & all the colors & the whole chaos of it & i see this migration towards Facebook & i sign up to Facebook to see what the deal is. Well, it's way squarer & NPR-er. Of course it is, you say, Facebook is for college students & Myspace is for teenagers. BUT, college students are still mostly teenagers & there are plenty of non-teenagers on Myspace. It is more of an attitude. As far as i can tell, you can't make a customized page for yourself on Facebook, everything is this calm, light-blue & grey boringness, while on myspace, you never know what someone's page is going to look like, which i like. You don't know what song is going to pop up either, or what youtube videos will start playing as well. It's like a miniature version of THIS. ((fast forward to 04:43.))

Anyhow, point being, i love advertisements, because they make life flashier & more interesting. People who don't like advertisements want more taxes, more control, probably are for smoking bans & are against noise pollution, the smell of exhaust, gasoline, solvents, etc, & are essentially against the true chaotic, flashy & gregarious mercantile nature of humanity. Facebook is the NPR of social networking jobbies. You are Terry Gross or Ira Glass (Eery Grass?), boring me to death.

Go ahead! Achieve all your goals! Break all the dams! Faster! You are unbound. Go ahead and fly with faster wings, with an ever greater pride for your achievements, with your conquests, with your empires, with your democracies. The pit must be filled; there is a need for fertilizer for the new tree that will grow out of your collapse.

20 years after the fact, 1988 is REALLY MAKING SENSE TO ME. IT'S A "THING". I REALLY GET IT. & I'M REALLY LOVING IT. Here's a bunch of music & stuff that i liked in 1988, even though not all of it came out then.

ROB BASE & DJ EZ ROCK: IT TAKES TWO

EZEE POSSEE: EVERYTHING STARTS WITH AN E

AKIRA

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cartoon intro.

DEEE-LITE: GROOVE IS IN THE HEART

CANDY FLIP: STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER

NWA: STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON

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My first son, Otto Thörbjörn Äaberg wearing ill-fitting lederhosen.

Edelweiss by Edelweiss. One of my favorite songs of all time.

Starship Edelweiss by Edelweiss. I'm not so sure about this one, but it does actually touch on one of my philosophical issues these days, which is where does culture go after we begin to explore deep space?

While i'm dwelling on silly old house music...
Make it Mine by THE SHAMEN

Papua New Guinea by the Future Sound of London

I was quite into the whole Acid House & early techno thing until the music got really boring to me & i met some actual "ravers". Oh man. I still love this stuff though! I'm feeling the video for Papua New Guinea. Love the screwy colors.

My students making trans-dimensional creatures, here they are in a 2-dimensional representation of Area 51. Pardon the glare, we used a mysterious reflective silvery material. My Recycle Art class is probably the only art class in the country skeptically teaching grade-schoolers about multiple dimension theories.

I've got a show up at the Indigo District here in Eugene for the month of april. Have a look.

Anyhow, so i've been having a BIG urge to go to some kind of a church that doesn't exist. I NEED to go feel the spirit with a bunch of people & yell & sing & testify & get a little out of it & then have coffee & a danish & talk to the neighbors. I've been feeling THE LORD quite a bit lately, even though my rational mind is a non-believer in it, that other part of me, the PSYCHIC POWERS & TRANS-DIMENSIONAL RECEPTORS are REALLY FEELING it lately. Lots of weird stuff is being processed in my head sub-consciously & i can just feel it. Like, i can feel THE BIG G-O-D. I've found it slipping out when i'm talking to people. "God didn't put us on this earth to this bullshit." I don't consciously even believe that, but it just feels right. I suppose this is what happens.

Anyhow, i'm also working on a couple of weird ideas called ACID REIGN & ACIDIC JEWS.

You can't do a wrong thing the right way.

We had a new baby yesterday! His name is Henry Leopold Aaberg. Born 3.28.08 21 inches 9lbs 5oz.


Henry is English via the Normans, it means "Home Ruler".

Leopold is of Old German origin, and its meaning is "brave people", it also has something to do with Lions. A saint's name. A royal or aristocratic name in Belgium, Austria, and Britain.

Aaberg is a Norwegian locational name meaning on the hill by the river.

Subcultures are just lame, for lame people. They're fun in terms of being interesting little pre-packaged objects & maybe they had some vitality at some point or resurgent vitality at points, punk was a good vehicle for me for a while, but eventually you just want to be part of the whole big picture & not in some fucking incubator for deformed social retards. The problem is that the big society has devolved into a piece of crap where women build culture from exercise videos & men build culture from video games. That's retarded. The top of the country doesn't seem to even know that the rest of society exists & would be very exciting to mold & form & do fun stuff with, but they just don't care. So subcultures are the natural place to find culture, or ethnic grottos also i guess. My point is, the most interesting people don't belong to anything because they transcend definition through their own existence.

I love markers. They are by far, my favorite thing to work with in the world of art. They are fun to look at, fun to collect, fun to draw with & look good when you have lots of them. Here are my coloring markers.



I tend to use the sharpies more than the copics as they sharpies are 1/6th the price & have some bolder colors & i've worked out a whole system with them. The copics are very nice markers, but are too expensive. They are refillable though, so that makes up for their price. I have been discouraged from using markers as my primary medium many times, but i always come back to them. Two of my favorite artists use markers primarily.

I was introduced to Vaughn Bode via a combination of graffiti, Ralph Bakshi's Wizards (Vaughn was supposed to work on this but they had some kind of falling out & then Vaughn died) & his son Mark doing my favorite issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Vaughn Bode named his son Mark after "Marker".



Pedro Bell is famous for his work for Funkadelic doing covers like Cosmic Slop. Bell's work is some crazy Cosmic Slop in its own way & is like the Funky Black Futurist parallel to the work of Cal Schenkel for Frank Zappa. He got his start doing cartoons & writing for his college newspaper & you can find alot of his early stuff reprinted in issues of Roctober.

I've got three solo art shows in the next three months. I gotta do alot of work every day or else... i have to show old stuff, but that's not what this is about. I've been thinking alot about ART & the ART world & how it just isn't appropriate for my stuff to be shown in proper galleries. The audience is all wrong, this is a cultural thing, this isn't for those gallery people.

The Mighty Warrior Junga Junga


The Toxic Jungle


Four Faces: Piles, Mr. Mandrill, Mr. Cheese & Grk Gregk


Suzi Q: Bananarchy: Anti-boring


The Breakfast Barbarian: Breakfast is the best meal of the day, but i don't like to eat in the morning. Lunch should start at 11 & last until two. The work day should go from 9-11, then brunch, then work from 2-5. You'd have happier, better workers.


Big influences right now...


The RAMM:ELL:ZEE: Rubbish Ocean: New York City Garbage God.

In case you didn't know, i'm running a whole other blog over here. http://mistersean.blogspot.com/ Its content is aimed more at a general audience, while this blog (I've Seen A Kaiser Roll/19091977) is not necessarily for everyone. I just posted this bit.

I am not into where Japanese animation & Manga have gone & what they have become. When i was a kid, i got into the stuff because American cartoons were really bad in the 80s. They're still really bad, but there have been some good ones that have come out (original TMNT, New Adventures of Mighty Mouse, Ren & Stimpy, the Simpsons). But in a medium which is limitless, the output has been extremely limited. So, American kids turn to Japanese cartoons for some variety. The stuff being released today is total crap, there is no argument, but alot of what was being brought here in the 70s & 80s were actually good cartoons, regardless of where they came from. Hayao Miyazaki is one of the best cartoon producers in the world, his earlier work is better, his newer work is beginning to suffer from George Lucas Syndrome. I was profoundly influenced by Miyazaki, half because of his obsessive use of the big blue sky with big white clouds & vast expanses of green fields & woodlands, half because of the post-apocalyptic world he constantly portrayed in his earlier movies (Nausicaa, Laputa, Future Boy Conana). Most of the earlier Japanese cartoons released for the US market had some aspect of post-apocalyptic-ness in them, which i love. Miyazaki later moved into his folklore phase with movies (Kiki's Delivery Service, Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle). Miyazaki started as a very slap-stick animator with excellent timing & real cartoony-ness to his work, but as that has gone out of vogue, his work has become more Anime-generic. Most of his works are scored by Joe Hisaishi (who is very influenced by Yellow Magic Orchestra & Ryuichi Sakamoto) who writes real tear-jerkers. Hayao Miyazaki's work is very influenced by French comic artist Moebius & Japanese manga/anime masters Osamu Tezuka & Leijii Matsumoto (add Miyazaki to those two & you've got the big guns of Japanese cartoons).

Future Boy Conan: Longer Intro plus extras: I was profoundly influenced by this work & wanted to live in this place.

Panda Ko Panda: Hilarious re-working of Pippi Longstocking with Pandas, this is my son's favorite cartoon. Pippi is his current favorite movie.

Totoro: This is a children's classic & should be seen by all kids. Fantastic.

Laputa: Ancient technology from Gulliver's Travels in a folked out post-apocalyptic Russian mining town.

Nausicaa: Miyaki's epic, the cartoon is a good way to get the gist of the whole series & see some exciting animated interpretations of the comic, but the comic is the best way to experience Nausicaa.

Porco Rosso: Shows Miyazaki's total obsession with military aircraft (why hasn't he made a tank movie yet?) & is a very fun watch.

Lupin: Castle Cagliostro: Showing off Miyazaki's earlier slapstick style but incorporates alot of elements he'll use in the movies that follow this excellent cops & robbers adventure story.


If you want to learn more about Hayao Miyazaki check out Nausicaa Net.

I was just watching my vhs copy (courtesy of Professor Curtis) of "COINTELPRO" The FBI's War Against Black America" the other night & thought i'd air some thoughts on the Panthers & Blackness. Growing up in Oakland, California in the 70s, 80s & 90s, the working class white people had moved out. Sure, there were a few of us here & there, but largely, the city was composed of working class blacks as the city base with an elite of middle class blacks & upper middle class WASPS & Jews. The Chinese were mostly in China Town & the Mexicans were mostly in the Fruitvale, there was less crossover back then. ANYHOW, there wasn't a funky white working class to emulate, so i looked to the other funky working class & that was the Black working class & they had this history of radical politics. My first exposure to the Panthers was through an exhibit of their newspaper art at the Oakland Museum, which was pretty cool & pretty crazy. Anyhow, the Panthers became my political model & still are, except that i'm not a communist, although i think that the Panthers weren't really, they were just using it as a model for their own goals & as a marketing tool. I mean, they sold Mao's "Little Red Book" to raise money for guns. That's American capitalism with a splash of the militia movement. Anyhow, as i have gotten involved with the freedom & liberty movement i've noticed that there's alot of crossover between what was happening to Blacks in America & what is happening to the broader White America today. Most people are in denial about this & want to believe that government loves you & is only out to help & make things nice, but if you have a historical understanding of Black America & the Native Americans (speaking of which, GO RUSSEL MEANS & Lakota Nation!!!) you understand what the government does to people that don't play ball. It's not good & it usually involves getting killed. As people are gearing up to vote for Clinton/Obama "Making you trust government again", i'd just like to remind you that who is President doesn't really matter, the country is already going the direction it is going & none of the front-runner candidates represent the constitution or meaningful rights for Americans. Whoever you vote for, government wins.

Look, you can watch the COINTELPRO documentary on youtube!


Professor Curtis' shop