November 6, 2008
Working on snow scenes for "Two-Page Westerns." Got a nice little vignette of El Kid travelling through snowbanks for homemade tamales.

Had lunch with Pierre O'Rourke, an old friend from Scottsdale. We traded Hugh O'Brian and Chris Pischke stories. Pierre was close to Chris and continues to be close to Hugh.

Mark Boardman sent me a funny article on Pulitzer Prize Winning Cartoonist Art Spiegelman (Maus). A couple quotes caught my fancy:

"The main thing to me is the Mark Twain quote. . .which is basically 'there's ain't no humor in heaven, and life is pain.' I think he nailed it on the head when he said everything human is pathetic, the secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. When you're watching Tina Fey, you're watching pain! Humor's just a specific way of telling the truth, when it's genuinely funny."

"Therapy is vomiting things up. Art is about eating your own vomit. There's a therapeutic aspect to all making, but the nature of working is to compress, condense, and shape stuff, not to just expunge it. It's not just an exorcism."

—Art Spiegelman