January 13, 2010
Got a call yesterday from longtime Arizona Republic columnist E. J. Montini. He got a letter from someone who remembered a Jones & Boze Radio Show in 1990 where we were offering concert tickets to the person who called in and told the most outrageous thing their significant other had ever done to them. We got the usual "My ex keyed my car," and the half-believable, "My girlfriend glued my Johnson to my stomach when I was passed out." Finally, a guy called and said, "Nobody can top this one, my wife killed our four-year-old son."

As ridiculous as this sounds today, it was a guy named Arizona Milke and his wife, Debra Milke was all over the news because she had hired two hitmen to kill their four-year-old son just before Christmas. The boy was told he was going to see Santa Claus and the hitmen took him out on the desert and shot him. (She's back in the news because the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered a hearing to determine if she should be granted a new trial.)

I'm tempted to say we were flattered that a front page newsmaker listened to our show, but, although it sounds vaguely familiar, I really don't remember it. We did so many insane things on that show. One of my partners, however, Jeanne Sedello, told me this morning that she definitely remembers it: "We were all incredulous but your jaw was on the floor." Inevitably, according to our lawyers, we had to give him the tickets (he was right, nobody could top that story).

I have to say this is one of those cringe worthy junctions where the assinine antics of morning drive radio meets harsh reality.

But, this is not the only place where my usually excellent memory has begun to fail me. About ten years ago, I got a call from a writer in Kansas City who said he was doing a book on historic Route 66 and did I have any stories about my father's gas station. I told him the true story about my father waiting on a guy, all dressed in black, driving a '57 T-Bird with Nevada plates who asked my dad to fill the tank while he went to the bathroom. My father put the nozzle on automatic switch and started cleaning the windows. As the gas came up into the neck of the tank, the automatic switch failed to cut off in time and the overflow created a pool of gas on the cement. When the guy came out from the bathroom, he saw the wide pool of spilled gas and told my father, rather gruffly, to take a gallon of gas off his bill. My father told him he was sorry for the spillage but that wasn't a gallon of gas. When the guy demanded once again to remove a gallon of gas from the bill and my father refused, the guy pulled a knife, put it up against my father's throat and said, "There's a gallon of gas there Buddy, and take it off my bill!

My dad said, "You want to see a gallon of gas?" and he held the nozzle straight out, pulled the trigger and watched the pump to measure out a full gallon of gas. Gas sprayed straight out for three feet, then cascaded on to the cement apron like a roaring river breaking the banks. When he had finished, my father said to the guy, "Now that's a gallon of gas and you're paying for that one as well."

The writer thought this was great and wrote down everything I said.

A month or so later, at Thanksgiving, my father came down from Kingman for a visit and after dinner I asked him to tell my kids the story of the guy from Vegas with the '57 T-Bird. My dad told me he didn't know what I was talking about.

When I reminded him of the spilled gas and told him I didn't want to spoil the story by telling more, he laughed and said, "Well, kid, first of all it was a '56 Chevy. The guy was from Texas and when he pulled the knife, I ran into the office and called the police, then hid in the lube room until they showed up."

My head was throbbing like a tiny, green pea. This story seemed so historically accurate in my mind. Where had I gotten all the wrong details and obvious exaggeration from? My father just smiled and reminded me that on every job site in the United States there is always one guy who is a B.S.er. It is almost a union bylaw ("Chicago, we can't start a job out here, we have no bulls----er."). As we compared notes, we decided we knew who probably told me the legendary story. Believe it or not, this is a photo of him:

His name was Tom and he worked at the Air Force Base on Radar Hill and he was a masterful B.S.er. He had been everywhere, done everything, and he told me the story. As the theory goes, it was so vivid, it became cemented in my memory bank as an authentic memory.

Yikes! I've become an old man who is on his way to befuddlement (some would claim I've already arrived).

Old Man Take A Look At My Life

"I'm a lot like you."
—Neil Young

January 12, 2010
Got some input on Arizona Charlie. For one thing, he evidently spelled it Arizona Charley. Here's some more info:

Marshall Trimble Weighs In On Arizona Charley
"Jayne Peace of Payson, authority on Arizona’s Mogollon Rim country, tells me Charley’s dad, John Moberly Meadows, was killed in the last Apache raid in the Payson area in 1882 and was the first person buried in the Payson Pioneer Cemetery. Also buried there are the bodies of Charley’s mother and his brother, Henry, who was also killed in the Indian raid.

“'Arizona Charley' Meadows, who went on to become a famous Wild West show performer, is buried in Yuma (it snowed the day he died in 1932).

"He was born in a snowstorm in normally dry Visalia CA, rode a horse named Snowstorm and the day he died it snowed in Yuma. He was a fascinating character. I talk about him in my live performances and refer to him as Arizona’s First Superstar.

"Charley’s brother, John Valentine Meadows, was shot in Gila County a few years after the Pleasant Valley War unpleasantness, but he recovered. He went back to California and became a drunk. John was murdered there in 1918 by an unknown assassin and is buried in the Los Angeles area."
—Marshall Trimble

Arizona Charlie Comments On Arizona Charley’s
Charlie Waters of Henderson, Nevada tells me there are two Arizona Charley’s casinos in the Vegas area. One is on the western side of the city, on Decatur Boulevard near Charleston. According to Marshall, descendants of Arizona Charley Meadows opened the casinos.

And this is a captured 8mm frame (above) of Charlie Waters belting out a song at the American Legion in 1964. And, yes, his ear appears to be burning.

“Success is largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.”
—William Feather

January 11, 2010
Although we finished the Durango & Silverton cover weeks ago, we have been wrestling with where to put the ISBN box for several days. Meghan didn't like the price box over Marilyn's butt. Dan The Man was adamant he didn't want it over her leg ("Might as well put it over her face," he sneered). The suggestion to put it in the lower right-hand corner was seen as "stopping the train." After several versions (Dan counted 14), we finally got it locked down where everyone can live with it:



Speaking of the cover, we had Johnny Boggs' name in the first rough of the cover, but he didn't make the final cut as we decided we had too many names in the box, nullifying the newsstand effect (you can't read it from ten feet), so we edited the list down to just the biggest star names. The irony is that this really should be called the "Johnny Boggs Memorial Issue" because his Santa Fe house is featured in Westward Home (with photos by Bill Lindley) and Johnny co-wrote Renegade Roads with Candy Moulton, and, of course, he has his regular column Boggs Unleashed. And, I mentioned him, and Rusty York, Thom Ross and Tracy Lee Hutton in my editorial. It's going to be a Boggs Bonanza!

Last night on The Simpson's 450th show, and the premiere of their 20th season, Krusty the Clown gets an unwanted partner, Princess Penelope (guest voiced by Anne Hathaway). At the end, the Princess ends up singing in a French cafe. When she finishes her sad song, the camera pans over to a table and there is Tintin weeping.

Speaking of the French phenom, got this from the Netherlands over the weekend:

"I read on your blog about your interest in Tintin. I myself am responsable for the electronic newsletter for the members of the Hergé Genootschap, a society with about 750 members collecting Hergé. (http://kuifje.nl/laatste_nieuws.htm).

"You might be interested in what's going on concerning Tintin here in Europe. The rights for all material belongs to Studios Hergé/Moulinsart. Spokesman is Nick Rodwell who married Hergé's widow. He is chasing after everybody who uses Hergé drawings without paying for it. A French autor, Bob Garcia, has to pay € 48000,00. A Danish artist who makes a kind of sexy cartoons with Tintin is fighting more than 11 years now but still continues with his art. Hid did not hear from Moulinsart since 18 months now. http://www.oleahlberg.dk/.

"Our society used to make 3 magazines each year. We were charged for € 35000,00 just for using illustrations we "were not allowed to", just for one issue. Since we did have permission by e-mail we are not willing to pay and wait for their next action.

"If you are interested I can give you more information."

Best regards,

Gé Bom
Moerasberg 19
4708 NK Roosendaal
Netherlands

Meanwhile, I did a page of Mickey Free sketches asking myself "What would Herge do?"

I believe this qualifies as satire and I am not liable for fees to Mr. Rockwell. And, on a related note, I also wondered if Heath Ledger would be a good model for Tom Horn:

Okay, maybe not.

"Pretend you're writing for a dog that can talk."
—A Simpson's writer on the secret for writing Homer lines

January 11, 2010
While I was walking Peaches up the road on a nice day here in Arizona, I got this chilly email from a certain Billy the Kid expert across the pond:

BBB: While you were walking your dog, this is how my house looked this morning:

—Frederick Nolan, Chalfont Saint Giles, England

Now that's a Winter Wanker Wonderland! Amazing what 10,000 miles will do to weather conditions.

"The big surprise this year may be that there are no big surprises."
—Duncan Richardson, equity investment officer

January 11, 2010
We now join the graphic novel Mickey Free, in progress: when Tom Horn worked at San Carlos in 1888 he was a well known roper of some skill. He is seen here as Freddy Remington sketched him, prior to attending a "Cowboy Competition" in Phoenix:

Horn attended the steer roping held on a ranch north of Phoenix in the open desert (about where Thomas Road and Central Avenue is today). Although there were other Arizona cowboys in attendance, the big money was on Horn and Arizona Charlie, seen here in a rare photo:

Charlie is the tall one with his stirrups practically touching the ground (he was a reported six foot four). The event was a success, and, while Horn turned in a record time (59 seconds), Arizona Charlie was neck and neck in the two day competition. Both finished in the money and a huge celebration followed at the Adams Hotel where everyone got gloriously drunk.

Horn was supposed to have accompanied Sheriff Glenn Reynolds this same weekend, escorting seven Apache prisoners, including The Apache Kid, to the train station at Casa Grande. All the prisoners were headed for Yuma and the territorial prison, known widely as a "hell-hole."

With Horn out of town, Reynolds tapped "Hunkydory" Holmes to ride herd on the In-din prisoners.

This is a gouache mugshot of the Apache Kay-gon-lay who was sentenced to a year in the pen for Grand Larceny. Although Apaches were quite adept at survival in harsh climes, many Apaches died at Yuma.

The Apache Kid would not be one of them.

“Always quit writing for the day when you know what the next sentence is going to be.”
—Ernest Hemingway

January 10, 2010
Nice day at home. Overcast and cool. Worked on a Tom Horn roper image. Not sure, but I think I got him. Verdict in the morning.

"Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. the moment you know how, you begin to die a little. the artist neverr entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark."
—Agnes de Mille, dancer

January 9, 2010
I've had the usual first week of a new year glitch of putting 2009 on checks and on this blog (went back in and changed them) and on my daily sketches. Finally getting used to writing twenty-ten, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. It's my sixth decade on the planet, and while I've experienced some dillies (the sixties come to mind), this last decade has been hard to beat when it comes to jarring ridiculousness. It has been described as The Decade From Hell, by Time magazine, and worse, by my friends in construction and real estate.

In The Year Twenty-Five Twenty-Five Will Man Still Write The Wrong Year On Checks?

And speaking of real estate, Kathy and I had dinner last night down at the Keg Steakhouse in Desert Ridge with Wonderful Russ and Wendy Shaw (split bill: $67 house account). They are in the process of retooling their business model. When I asked if they are cutting back on advertising Wendy said, "No, the model isn't broken, we just need to tweak the message." Very smart. So many of us panic and cut the very thing, advertising, that keeps the money flowing. It's literally like cutting off oxygen in an emergency room to save money on electricity. Of course, this is easy to say, but much harder to do in practice. I really respect their focus and commitment. That was inspiring.

Gorgeous day on the Sonoran Desert. Went for a walk with Peaches at about eight. Mid-sixties, got up to low seventies this afternoon. Attacked sketches with a vengeance, whipping out 25 scenes by lunch. Did another dozen this afternoon.

I've got some heavy travel coming up at the end of the month. Flying to Lubbock for a speech at the Ranching Association (I'll post a flyer on Monday), and I'm teaching at the Orme School first week of February, and, after that, flying to Salt Lake City to speak to a group of history teachers (I think from all over the state).

I have been contacted by a group from the Netherlands who saw my blog posts on Tintin. They are having messy copyright issues with a studio who claims all the rights to Herge's artwork. Fascinating problem, especially in this free download era. More details next week.

"If you've seen the present then you've seen everything—as it's been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it."
—Marcus Aurelius, Roman philosopher-emperor, 200 A.D.

January 8, 2010
Had a heart test today at 2:15 down at Scottsdale North. Nurse Tamara did an ultrasound of my heart. Got to watch the images of my damaged ticker on a computer screen. Man, that little puppy works hard, 24/7. Makes me appreciate what it does very much. Results next week.

Six Degrees of Arizona Charlie
Came back to the office and Carole had a message and a packet from a True West reader who claims to be the great grandson of Walt Coburn, a famous pulp Western writer who also wrote for this magazine. The grandson left an old October, 1965 edition of True West (cover price 35 cents!). And I took a gander, and, lo and behold, there on page 14 and 15 was a feature on "Dawson: Paris of the North":

Well, that, coincidentally, is where Arizona Charlie had his Palace Grand Theater. Started reading the captions, and yep, there it is, big as day:

I read somewhere that the state or someone restored the Palace to its former glory. Think it was in the 1950s or 1960s, and that there is a big statue of Arizona Charlie nearby.

I believe there is a Nevada casino called Arizona Charlie's not far from Hoover Dam on old Highway 93. I wonder if it's named for our Charlie, or is it just a funny name that some gangster made up?

“Bars in the daytime are like women without makeup.”
—from the Japanese movie, Woman Ascends Stairs

January 8, 2010
Kathy and I met the kids down at Flo's Asian Kitchen in Scottsdale last night for dinner ($30 something, Deena bought). Nice when your kids can finally pick up a tab once in a while:

Afterwards we all went to hear a monk talk about meditation. His advice for a happy life: Be present. Be mindful. Be non-judgmental. When I went for a walk this morning with Peaches I realized I rarely do all three. But that's just me being judgmental.

We're due for a good Western, aren't we? Just heard that Jonah Hex, starring Josh Brolin and Megan Fox will be released this June. Looking forward to it.

I think the last big Western that really caught the public's attention was this one:

We had fun with that one, although I think most of our readers preferred the old one with Glenn Ford:

Which is why I put Glenn above Russell Crowe (well, that and the fact that I thought Crowe's hat was kind of goofy). And by the way, have you seen the previews for the new Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe? Looks like they're trying to capture a little Gladiator styled lightning in a bottle. Very heavy metal soundtrack, a la 300.

The more I see No Country For Old Men (it plays quite a bit on cable), the more I think the Coens will do something strong with True Grit:

I've mentioned before that when I was in Little League I iced jugs for tips in my father's gas station:

Al Bell's Flying A was one of those post WWII mega-gas-stations. I saved all summer to buy Edward Bartholomew's Biographical Album of Western Gunfighters. I think it cost $11 and I ordered it from an ad in True West magazine.

Every summer my father would pile my mother and I in a 1957 Ford and we'd head out on Old Route 66 to the family farm in Iowa:

My dad's idea of a good time was going to the farm outside Thompson, Iowa and eating five times a day, and talking about crops. We often went down to Lippo Asmus's farm (that's Lippo, above with his wife Annie, BBB, Minnie Hauan Bell—my grandmother, my mother, and my grandfather, Carl Marvin Bell.

Here's a page of sketches I ran across this morning that captures the mood and the grit of a One Page Wonder:

Now to apply that to narrative imperative. Hmmmm, I wonder what ol' Will has to say about this?

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."
—Will Durant

January 7, 2010
Okay, I went home for lunch and whipped out another study for Arizona Charlie:

Gave his eyes some emotion. I think I know this guy (it's Wacco!) And then remembered I have a rare photo of Charlie in a great book called The Klondike Quest by Pierre Berton:

This is a photo from The Palace Grand Dance Hall in Dawson, Alaska (it still exists). Check out those Sports to the left of Chas! Amazing. The text says Arizona Charlie often shot glass balls held between his wife's thumb and forefinger, until he accidently shot off her thumb and the exhibitions ceased. The saloon was allegedly constructed from the remains of two steamboats, although the copy also says his "family had been wiped out by the Apaches and [Charlie] boasted he had fought hand to hand with Geronimo." So, take it all with a grain of salt.

Speaking of grains, here is a triptych of the jacked casing that the Ringo Kid ejected from the movie Stagecoach:

You get a little more sense of the action with this verion. Thanks Robert Ray. Very cool.

"Poker exemplifies the worst aspects of capitalism that have made our country so great."
—Walter Matthau

January 7, 2010
Charlie Meadows, aka Arizona Charlie, shows up from time to time in different books but not much has ever been done on him.

His father, John Meadows and a brother were killed when Apaches raided their ranch northeast of Payson in 1883. The subsequent fight up on the rim near Blue Ridge Reservoir became known as The Battle of Big Dry Wash and is the last major U.S. battle with Apaches.

As I mentioned yesterday, Arizona Charlie competed in "Cowboy Competitions" in Prescott, Payson and Phoenix, then joined Buffalo Bill for a European tour. He came home and started his own Wild West show which started out well, in Phoenix, but then went off the rails on the road in California. Charlie tried to stage a bull fight in Colorado, then went to Alaska where he eventually opened The Palace Grand Theater in Dawson. It was a huge success for a while, then petered out as the miners left. Meadows sold out for $17,000 and came back to Arizona. He either died in 1912 or 1932 in Yuma. If you want to know more, here is a nice piece written on Arizona Charlie by my friend Jim Cook.

Meanwhile, after Marshall Trimble told me yesterday about The Duke spinning his Winchester in Stagecoach and a shell is ejected and blows by he ear, I went home last night and tried to find it. It's not in the famous scene where we first meet the Ringo Kid and the camera pans in, goes out of focus, then comes to rest on Wayne's face as he realizes Curly, the sheriff, is on the approaching stage. I ran this scene over and over looking but couldn't see it. Finally, I let the scene play out and as the Ringo Kid walks to the stage with his saddle, he has words with the sheriff, then the cavalry, which has been following at a distance, rounds the corner, coming in sight, and Duke turns and spins his Winchester one more time (Marshall is correct, he already has a shell in the chamber, why is he re-cocking? Because it looks cool!). And, it is here, that the shell clearly shoots by John Wayne's right ear.

Now capturing this off the DVD was tricky. Robert Ray spent most of this morning trying to isolate the frame. This is as close as we could get it:

"A boor is someone who is successful in the endeaver you failed at."
—Old Vaquero Saying

January 6, 2010
Went home for lunch and bailed into a study of Arizona Charlie. Here is a photo of this dapper dude:

Charlie was a renowned roper and went head to head with Tom Horn at a steer roping contest in Phoenix in 1888. In fact, it was because of this event, or, actually the fact that Tom Horn couldn't assist Sheriff Glenn Reynolds, that led directly to the Apache Kid's escape. Anyway, here is my first pass at this gangly cowboy (he was six foot four):

I've heard tell that Buffalo Bill offered both Arizona Charlie and Tom Horn a shot at being Wild West Show Trick Ropers, and that Charlie took him up on it, but Tom thought he could make better money shooting people from ambush. It will all make sense in the Mickey Free graphic novel.

Meanwhile, here is a recent sketch of Al Sieber talking to Mickey Free:

And, here's a more simple version of the same scene that Herge, of Tintin fame, might have made of the same Chief of Scouts:

“The dirty little secret about simplicity is that it’s really hard to do.”
—J Mays

January 6, 2010
It's funny (to me) how certain cartoon characters have inspired me, and, in some cases stalked me. I first heard of Tintin in the eighties when I was doing Honkytonk Sue and flirting with a Hollywood movie deal at Columbia Pictures. On the lot at Warner Bros (in Goldie Hawn's production offices) I heard a rumor that Steve Spielberg had just purchased the rights to the internationally famous cartoon strip (60 books and 200 million sales in 70 languages), and yet, here I was a cartoonist who had never heard of Tintin. Ouch!

The Belgian cartoonist and author, George Remi (1907-1983), went by the pen name Herge, which is a reversal of the artist's real name, or actually, the pronunciation of his initials. His strip about a boy reporter and his dog travelling the world to solve crimes became an instant hit in Brussells and France, then spread to Spain, Portugal, Germany and England and almost every country on the planet, except the United States (when I asked my production staff if they had ever heard of Tintin, everyone shrugged).

Herge's style is quite clean and yet very sophisticated. Last September when we were in South America, we traveled up into the mountains outside of Santa Cruz, Bolivia to a small village named Samaipata, which means to rest up high. We stayed at a combination organic farm—B&B compound run by a Dutch ex-pat named Peter who has lived in Bolivia for the past three decades. As he put it, he "escaped the rat race long ago." Well, it turned out that our host at La Vispera is a huge fan of Tintin and had a stash of the boy reporter's adventures, in Spanish, stocked in a cabinet in his organic cafe (where we had delicious herbal, mega-organic omelettes with pan queques, pancakes).

While eating outside on the patio overlooking the town and the valley, I spied the stack of Tintin books and grabbed one to take back to the room. Safely inside my mosquito netting, I was struck, once again, by the clean design and clarity of line in the drawings, and so, for my six sketches for the day, I copied scenes from Herge's Tintin panels:

And, the next day, I grabbed another Tintin book at breakfast and shadowed Herge some more:

What I'm attempting by shadowing him, is to find out what makes it so compelling. And then we flew home and I sort of forgot about Tintin for a while, until I saw a review in the New York Times for several new books on the artist and his creation. So, with a $50 gift certificate from Amazon, I ordered two Tintin books (The Adventures of Herge: Creator of Tintin by Michael Farr, and Tintin And Alph-Art, Herge's last and unfinished adventure). Once again, the sparse and clean line of Herge impacted me and my daily sketches.

And, last night I experimented with how Herge might have illustrated Frederic Remington:

Pretty fascinating. Need to pull back, more symbols for eyes, etc.

Now I hear that Steven Spielberg is finishing The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn which will be out in 2011. Playing Tintin will be Jamie Bell (no relation) and Daniel Craig as Red Rackman. Principal photography was finished in 35 days last summer, with the Avatar style motion capture technology and now the rest of the time will be spent on creating Tintin's world. Amazing.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Spielberg acquired the rights to the comic strip in 1983 through his Universal-based Amblin Entertainment. Spielberg since went on to form DreamWorks but the desire to bring Tintin to the big screen never left him. He re-acquired the rights with his longtime producer, Kennedy, who is now partnered with Frank Marshall in the Universal-based Kennedy/Marshall Co.

Will it work? Will Tintin finally become a big hit in the U.S.? Will shadowing his sparse and clean line liberate me to finish Mickey Free? Well, you know how predictions are. . .

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
—Yogi Berra

January 6, 2010
One of our readers asked Marshall Trimble about actors in Westerns jacking shells into their Winchesters just before a fight and did this really happen in the Old West and Marshall answered it this way:

"Hi Barry:
"I contacted Jim Dunham, Director of Special Projects at the Booth Museum, in Cartersville Georgia to get his thoughts on this. He's spent a lot of time on Hollywood western movie sets and responds: "All actors are always looking for "business" or stuff to do with their hands and bodies to create a believable character. Marlon Brando for example was always scratching at his face. Not because his face had an itch, but because it built character. Every time you see an actor cock a rifle or spin a cylinder before a fight that's what they are doing. In reality it would be stupid. If you have a round loaded when it comes flying out when levered and if you don't see a round fly even worse, it means you had an unloaded rifle until that moment. By the way when John Wayne as the Ringo Kid first arrives in "Stagecoach" and flips his Winchester Model 92 in a circle you can see the 5 in 1 rifle blank fly past his head just missing his ear."
—Marshall Trimble

I didn't know this! In fact I must have seen that clip five times this weekend. My mother-in-law Betty Radina got me a boxed set of John Ford-John Wayne movies for Christmas and I was watching the Special Features on Sunday night and they must have shown the Ringo Kid clip from Stagecoach five times and I didn't see the blank flying past his head. I will surely check it out tonight!

And speaking of the Special Features, they included a radio broadcast of the 1946 Academy Awards and I was casually listening to it and the announcer, sets up the story of Stagecoach by saying it was based on a short magazine story about a stage coach running to "Lordsburg, Arizona." Of course, Lordsburg is in New Mexico (my mother was born there) and I thought it was interesting that Hollywood, or, in this case, some radio honcho in Hollywood, was too lazy to look it up. Ha. Having been in both businesses let's just say, I can relate.

“There is no bullsh-- with books. What’s on the page is what’s going on the page. It’s either good enough to last or it’s not.”
—Robert Caro, biographer, in Esquire magazine

January 6, 2010
Well, not everybody likes James Cameron's billion dollar baby. I mentioned to the Top Secret Writer that Avatar is so much a Western it's not even funny, and perhaps we could learn a thing or two from it. Got this scathing review back:

Avatar Villain Turns On College Professor
"BBB: Now let us not use Avatar as a model of work ethic. Cameron is a billionaire--he has no day job (or two). He has not made a film since 1997. His movie, which I found a weird merger of the cartoon Pocahontas and Dances With Wolves (and not as good a film as either), is a marvelous spectacle of computer-generated genius but a total bust as story (much like an old wooden DeMille epic--spectacle ten, story two). The writing was ham-fisted and the characters one-dimensional. The idiotic use of modern political terms (shock and awe--we must fight terror with terror) was obtrusive and jarring, taking the viewer out of the make-believe world. My favorite character was Lang's Colonel--at least he believed in something! This film has nothing to teach anyone about writing a story. To think I took all the kids (plus boyfriends--10 humans at $11.50 each) to this 3-D mess and thus contributed to Cameron's cavier - hate America and all Western civilization while growing fat off it - lifestyle is infuriating."
—Paul Andrew Hutton

Leave it to Hutton to admire and relate to the villain of the piece. Ha.

"Has anyone seen Avatar? They made another $300 million this weekend. Oh wait, that's Tiger Woods' wife."
—David Letterman

January 5, 2010
In the current issue of True West I talk about my early obsession with finding a Range Rider style fringe pullover shirt. Here is a photo of Jock Mahoney as The Range Rider with a young tike who ironically wears a fringe jacket:

See, this is what upset me. I was nine and The Range Rider was just the coolest character ever and I really, really wanted a pullover like Mr. Rider's, but all of the stores I went into (from Iowa to Arizona), they only had jackets (with a zipper!). I know I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but I'm still upset about this, all these years later. Here's someone who wants to help:

A Bonified Range Rider Pullover
“Tell Bob Boze Bell that I read Best of the West and he might find the fringed tunic he is looking for under rivercrossinginc.com I'm not connected with them in anyway...I was looking for women's western wear but at this site I noticed the leather tunics he mentioned in the recent True West - they are pricey but look authentic. P.S. Love the mag!”
—Rosel Wesley

While I may still have time to get a fringe pullover, some goals I've had to let go of, like meeting Norman Rockwell and John Wayne. Someone who did get to meet the Duke is this young man:

That, my friends, is Brian Downes who spent 35 years with the Chicago Tribune before taking on the job as head guy at the John Wayne Birthplace in Winterset, Iowa. Brian got to meet Wayne at his home in 1977. A lucky, lucky guy.

Meanwhile, last night I watched a Netflix flick Sunshine Cleaning. It was quirky, but in terms of story telling I really enjoyed it. Sent this email to the Top Secret Writer today:

Paul,
I sense that sometimes, perhaps, my movie diet upsets your stomach. With that in mind, I just saw Sunshine Cleaning last night. It was filmed in Albuquerque and I kept expecting to see your house (that's a joke, Amy Adams and Emily Blunt clean houses of biohazard materials). Anyway, in the ending wrap-up, or, what the French call the Day-Nue-Muaw, they wrap up four separate plot points without an ounce of dialogue. 1.) The screw-up sister (Blunt) gets to take her road trip: we see her in the car driving across the desert. Cut to an overhead of a world map drawn on a playground, with kids running across it on recess. Cut to a pretty, young blond girl (who looks like Tracy Lee) on a swing, smiling at someone. 2.) It's the nerdy bastard child of Amy Adam's character and he's watching the girl on the swing thru WWII binoculars that the messed-up grandfather (Alan Arkin) bought him, 3.) the kid rolls up his sleeve to show a fake, rub on tattoo that says "Lil' Bastard" a gift from Blunt's character earlier at a birthday party. 4.) Cut to Amy and Alan in Hasmat suits starting to clean a house. He blanches at the smell she says something about the kind of detergent they'll need and in they go. All of this while the song "Spirit In The Sky" comes up on the soundtrack and carries us into the credits.

Some young kid named Meghan wrote this script and it is pretty damn amazing. We need multiple wrap-ups like this for Mickey Free. So far, we have two (the watch and the New Day line). Don't you think?
—BBB

Went for a walk with Peaches last night just before dark. Beautiful sunset. Not sure she enjoyed it as much as I did.

“Nobody’s going to tell me that my dog doesn’t love me. That’s crazy talk.”
—Carrie Underwood, in Esquire

January 5, 2010
Just got an update on the remake of True Grit from our Westerns Editor, Henry Beck. Check it out.

And while we're at it, here's a blog Henry also recommended: Fifty Westerns From The Fifties

“The dirty little secret about simplicity is that it’s really hard to do.”
—J Mays, chief designer at Ford Motor Company, in Esquire magazine

January 4, 2010
Went home for lunch and whipped out a campfire study:

With the exception of those ghost horses, I think it works (what do you think Jeff?). I'll probably bring down the horizon line and make them silhouettes in the moonlight.

Meanwhile, speaking of cowboy stars, looks like some cats we know are going to get their own stamp this year:

This was from an art page, so not sure if it's a parody of a stamp, or what. Pretty sweet, though.

Hey, we need you to take our Reader's Survey. Please do it today.

"The hardest part of stopping is stopping."
—Kelsey Grammer, in Esquire magazine

January 4, 2010
Took in a slew of movies over the holidays, including Up In The Air, Cinema Paradiso (thanks Steve Peroni), The making of Stagecoach (thanks Brad and Grandma Betty), Two Lovers (thanks Blockbuster) and It's Complicated, And, of course, the game changer: Avatar, which is so much a Western it's not even funny.

He breaks a bronc, only this time it's a quasi-dragon, he is accepted into the tribe, a la Dances With Wolves. There's a huge battle with horse riding natives.

As mentioned in the New York Times yesterday, the movie makes a heavy-handed point that technology is bad, which is quite ironic considering the army of technicians who made this juggernaut of a 3D wonder, then unleashed it around the world with the latest techno-software-pipeline distribution system (the movie just broke a billion dollars worldwide this past weekend and $28 of our dinero is in the kitty).

We saw it in 3D Imax. We went early on Saturday to Desert Ridge and the first showing at 11 was sold out. We asked for the 3:15 showing and the kid told us, "We have five seats left." We took 'em, got in line early and fought our way in to the box with the 3D glasses in it being held by an usher, only they aren't called ushers anymore, are they? Floor flushers? Popcorn bag extractors?

To think that 3D failed so miserably the first time around ( a half century ago!). Remember the famous Life magazine photo of the theater full of people in baggy clothes wearing goofy looking paper glasses? Well, they're plastic now, but just as goofy looking. And, hey, the baggy clothes look is back in style as well.

The look of the movie is spectacular, of course. Things in the foreground come clear off the screen and right into your lap, and, about half way in, you hardly notice anymore, until a firefight when a cruise missile comes straight out into your face and you wince like a playground kid in a rock fight.

But the techno advance I am the most intrigued by is, you guessed it, the word balloons. Or, in this case, the translation subtitles. Normally, when someone speaks a foreign language, a long line of type, usually reversed out in white, appears along the bottom of the screen. This presents a problem when two people are talking at the same time. This is handled by a line of dialogue with a space, or, sometimes a rule separates them. In Avatar, James Cameron, has utilized a floating type font (way too fancy for my tastes—it's what we call a Showing-Off-Type-Face) which appears in front of the character talking. Picture a huge scene with hundreds of Lakota, I mean Near-has, or whatever they're called, and the hero says something. The translation appears just in front of him, taking up a tiny, but very specific portion of the screen, so that we know it's him talking. It's amazing and still kind of clumsy, or antiquated. But that's just me obsessing about how to handle word balloons. Ha.

As I told the Top Secret Writer, Cameron has been working on the Avatar project for four years and when he started he didn't have the cameras needed to pull it off so he invented them. Meanwhile, we have been working on Mickey Free for about the same amount of time. One of these days I intend to solve the word balloon problem, not to mention perhaps even storyboarding the damn thing. Well, "It's a new day" (and a new decade) as the Apache Kid might say (and does).

Gee, I wonder what ol' McGinnis has to say about this?

"Imagination was given to us to compensate for what we are not; a sense of humor was given to us to console us for what we are."
—Mark McGinnis

December 31, 2009
Always a day of reflection as the efforts of the old year recede into oblivion and the hopes of a new year loom. Yesterday I went through my daytimer and made two categories: things I failed miserably at and things I accomplished successfully. The first list is long and I won't bore you. The second list is personal and I won't bore you although I will say I am very proud and thankful that we are holding our own in this economy. The idea, or concept, is to take the items on the first list and let them go, and then focus on the second list and be thankful for what you have, or in this case, what I have. The fact that I'm even here is high on the list. Ha.

Worked today on finishing two studies I posted yesterday. First up "Storm Rider::

And my "Navajo Raiders Return":

A little too mushy, but it is a study. Also did another Elephant Butte storm study:

Catch you all next year!

"Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!"
—Jane Austin