21 Essays

Saturday, December 29, 2012

The New Ground Rules

Last April, I decided to experiment with some week-long series that looked for essay possibilities within either a single year or set of years. I selected the time periods via a random year generator (kinda fun to do!). From April through November, I did some cursory explorations of 1811-1815, 1856-60, 1930, 1955, 1963, 1965, and 2006.

Since I thoroughly enjoyed this time-focused approach, I’ve decided to expand upon the strategy in 2013. Knowing that I work best when confined by arbitrary and numbered ground rules, here are my new guidelines for the coming year:

21 Essays will cover six time-periods in 2013. The January focus will be 1913, allowing me to explore some highlights of the world, 100 years ago. The other five time periods will be chosen through the random year generator.

Essay series will naturally emerge. When I have five or more essays on a single subject, I’ll group them into an informal essay series. Originally, I hoped to be able to keep up a pace of publishing 21-essays-in-21-days on this blog, but I’ve learned this is an unrealistic goal for me. With this new approach, I’ll post in-depth on topics that I find most inspiring but without any firm promises to crank out a full 12, 15, or 21 essays.

After a month of heavy concentration on a single time period, I’ll relax things in the second month. If I feel like it, I can continue working on the time period, or I can revisit earlier essay series (like King Kong, Duck Dodgers, In the Bleak Midwinter, Der Golem, or Blackmail), or I can take some well-deserved time off.

Most importantly, I reserve the right to relax, change, or abandon the rules whenever I like.

Here’s the big benefit of the changes…

I run two blogs, 21 Essays and Tour America’s Treasures. Previously, they had no real connection, aside from sharing the same writer/publisher. But now I can think of my blogs as a complementary pair. Tour America’s Treasures is a cultural history blog with a focus on place. 21 Essays is a cultural history blog with a focus on time.

Place and time: I think it sounds like a good way to do history.

Monday, December 10, 2012

The Story of Civilization

Midway through this past year, I wrote a new lead sentence for my official blog description: 21 Essays is my cultural history blog.

It took some trial and error on my part to realize that my initial blog concept was too open-ended. I thought I wanted complete freedom to write about anything that struck my fancy. But looking back now, I clearly see that there was a very real connecting link between my favorite pieces. They all shared a love of cultural history.

When I was young, I read half of Will and Ariel Durant’s 11-volume The Story of Civilization. By that, I don’t mean that I read midway through volume 6 (which would have left me stranded in the Reformation). I mean that I read the parts that interested me: the sections that covered the history of literature, art, science, philosophy, and religion, as well as the descriptions of the history of domestic life. I skipped over the royal intrigues and the endless wars.

Forty years later, I’m still relatively uninterested in the history of power. As far as I can see, it’s still the same story ever repeating—only the weapons change. But I love culture more than ever. The ideas that shape our world are constantly in flux. Whether in novels, poetry, film, music, or painting, every artist expresses a new interpretation of the world. There’s a thrilling wildness in the variety and beauty of creation.

So starting in January 2013, 21 Essays will officially be my cultural history blog. Of course, I won’t be attempting to repeat the Durants’ mad 11-volume achievement and try to cover everything. I’ll continue to write about the artifacts and artworks that I personally find most exciting, examining them closely and from multiple perspectives in order to (in the words of William Blake) “… see a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower.”

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Wrong Turn

With 16 essays out of the promised 21 completed, I’m quitting the animation series. My heart isn’t in it. It’s not what I want to be doing at this blog.

So I’ve been taking a little time off as I consider where I want to take 21 Essays in 2013. I think I have some good ideas.

From the start, I’ve pictured 21 Essays as a place where I could write in-depth on very focused topics—specific movies, books, poems, paintings, and music that mean a lot to me. Unfortunately, the format that I adopted for the animation series never allowed for that approach. I found myself writing a paragraph apiece on three animated shorts, when what I really wanted was to write a full essay series for each of them. That’s what this blog was supposed to be about.

Nevertheless, I think this has been a very good first year for 21 Essays. I loved creating the 15 essays on King Kong, the 12 essays on “In the Bleak Midwinter,” the 15 essays on Duck Dodgers, and the 6 essays on Blackmail. That’s the kind of work that I want to be doing.

So I’m going to be making some changes on this site, doing a little tinkering. I think I’ve got a blog that has promise… and I’m hoping that it will more consistently deliver on that promise in the coming year.

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Animating with Live Action Footage

Cartoon-blogging, essay 16 of 21 blog entries on

250 great animated short films

Dream Work (2003), directed by Peter Tscherkassky.

The 16th essay, “Animating With Live Action Footage,” is published in full at Press Play at IndieWire. It deals with several extremely challenging films that fall along the borderline between live action and animation. As the highlighted films by Peter Tscherkassky, Virgil Widrich, and Norman McLaren are experimental, I struggled to find an accessible way to describe what I see in them. My experience with a Beatles song suggested a way in…

First, a memory which has been seared into my brain: It’s 1973 and my cousin and I are alone in the house, obsessively playing and replaying the last minute of the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” backwards on a cheap plastic portable turntable. And I’m getting seriously creeped out.

Continue reading here…

This series of 21 essays is inspired by a list of 250 great animated short films, composed in August 2012 by Scott Bussey, Jorge Didaco, Waldemar Hepstein, Bill Kamberger, Robert Reynolds, Sulo Vatanen, and Lee Price, with additional assistance from participants on the IMDb Classic Film message board.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Animating Horror

Cartoon-blogging, essay 15 of 21 blog entries on
250 great animated short films

The Sandman (1993), directed by Paul Berry.

The fifteenth essay, “Animating Horror,” is published in full at Press Play at IndieWire. A special Halloween essay, it focuses on three films from our list: The Tell-Tale Heart (Ted Parmelee, 1953), Harpya (1979, Raoul Servais), and The Sandman (1993, Paul Berry).

It’s the witching hour…

The Sandman (1993), directed by Paul Berry.

The Tell-Tale Heart (1953), directed by Ted Parmelee.

Harpya (1979), directed by Raoul Servais.

The moon is out...

The Tell-Tale Heart (1953), directed by Ted Parmelee.

The Sandman (1993), directed by Paul Berry.

A lonely house at night...

Continue reading here…

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Animating Without a Narrative

Cartoon-blogging, essay 14 of 21 blog entries on
250 great animated short films

Pixillation (1970), directed by Lillian Schwartz.

The fourteenth essay, “Animating Without a Narrative,” is published in full at Press Play at IndieWire. Written by guest blogger Scott Bussey, this is an unusually personal essay on the abstract animated short films of Adam Beckett and Lillian Schwartz.

Adam Beckett was an animator and visual effects artist who attended the California Institute of the Arts during the 1970s, where he learned from and studied alongside important members of the LA experimental animation scene. Lillian Schwartz is a pioneer in the field of computer art who worked out of Bell Labs during the 1970s, then going on to develop tools for computer-aided analysis of art, particularly finding inspiration in the work of Leonardo Da Vinci. Each of these relatively unknown animators is represented by one work on the “250 Great Animated Short Films” list: Heavy-Light (1973) for Beckett and Pixillation (1970) for Schwartz.

Continue reading here…

Friday, October 19, 2012

Animating Real Life

Cartoon-blogging, essay 13 of 21 blog entries on
250 great animated short films

Ryan (2004), directed by Chris Landreth.

The 13th essay, “Animating Real Life,” is published in full at Press Play at IndieWire. The essay begins with perhaps the first animated documentary, Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), and then moves on to some very challenging examples of modern psychological realism: Frank Film (1973), Ryan (2004), and Orgesticulanismus (2008).

“… but I’m getting off the subject here, I’m afraid. This story is about Ryan.”

The subject of Ryan (2004) is real: animator Ryan Larkin (1943-2007). The story is drawn from real life, as pieced together from recorded interviews. The visual approach is . . . director Chris Landreth’s interpretation of real life.

Continue reading here…