My Batman

As a preface to a review the Leopard will be posting soon on the Dark Knight movie, here's a a little background on my personal relationship with the character.

I love Batman. The first drawings I ever did were of him. One of the fondest memories I have are when I was about 8 or 9 years old taking the Staten Island Ferry with my father. In the ferry station, they would have these enormous newsstands, and there was always a Superman or Batman comic book or two. I'd always pick Batman, of course. For some reason his image always appealed to me. I related to him somehow. Maybe it was his outsider status. I just thought there was just something beautiful about him.

Although I haven't really read many new issues in years because of the massive glut of material that's produced, but I've gotten my kids into him, and I'll sometimes drop by comic stores to see what's been done with the character. It's one of the few constants of my life.

Turiyasangitananda

I heard something very disturbing a few weeks ago, but what was especially disturbing about it was how and when I found out.

I was recently reading an interview with a well known jazz musician,  who casually mentioned that Alice Coltrane was dead. I almost dropped the magazine.

Also known by her Hindu name Turiyasangitananda, Coltrane was a brilliant pianist as well as harpist and composer. She died January 14th of last year at the age of 69.  

Because she was not quite a mainstream household name on the level of her legendary husband, this was not widely reported.  To me this oversight was not just a reflection of the lack of interest in serious artists and culture in America, but subtle racism.  Alice Coltrane was Yoko to John Coltrane's well, John.   He wrote one of his seminal works, A Love Supreme while living with her, and she played in his last groundbreaking band for several years, taking the seat away from the great pianist McCoy Tyner with her own brand of lyricism. After her husband' s death, she created many wonderful albums of her own, Including Journey To Satchidanada and Monastic Trio, combining her unique piano with ethereal harp playing, along with superb musicians like Pharoah Sanders and Rashied Ali.

She made her last album, Translinear Light in 2005 with her son Ravi.

An excellent composer and improvisor, and a longtime devotee of Hinduism,  and a lover of peace throughout the world, she will be missed.

My Job World Part 2

Around 1994, I began to learn some of the basic design programs which were still coming into fashion: Pagemaker, Photoshop, Freehand and a little later, Quark.

The Leopard's background has mostly been in drawing, so it took a little getting used to a technological mindset. Soon, I had a little experience working on small publications, but for the most part, I was kinda of figuring things out as I went along. My first real gig as a designer was at a small magazine called Pizza Today in Indiana.

Yup, a magazine solely about-- pizza. And yes, before you ask, The Leopard did get a lot of free pizza. The whole enterprise was really a promotional device for the owner, who put on a huge Pizza Expo every year for vendors catering to the business. Apparently, this was extremely lucrative and made him a millionaire. But the magazine was legit. It was bi-monthly, and there was a full staff. The thing I remember the most was sitting around in an editorial meetings discussing stories about pizza. How they come up with them issue after issue, I'll never know.

After leaving there, I took a gig at a tiny minority-owned ad agency. It was run by a former football player who didn't really have much experience but a lot of "heart". He used to call me B.O.P. (Big Ol' Pimp) because I drove around in a late 70's customized van at the time that an uncle gave me--a Leopardmobile if you will. There were numerous cash flow problems at the agency. Sometimes, we didn't get paid at all. Eventually, he fired the whole lot of us except for one guy. But I learned a lot while I was there about the business.

But boy oh boy, did I have learn the hard way.

Summer Movie Mini-Reviews 1

Hancock
Will Smith, Jason Bateman
I loved the premise of this film. What if a superhero was not a nice guy but a drunk, and a coke snorter? What if he's a fuck-up and doesn't care about anyone but himself ? What if he's homeless, imperfect, a jerk? What if he's black?

Being life-long comic book fan, it sounds like a breath of fresh air. But a movie is more than one original idea, charismatic stars, an abundance of special effects. Hancock works at times and sometimes not. Despite the innovations in the script, the screenplay occasionally veers into typical Hollywood superhero movie cliches in the second half, which makes what could have been a great movie into merely a fine one.


Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Ron Perlman, Selma Blair
Though the first Hellboy worked very well as terrific superhero movie, nicely imagined by the thoughtful auteur Guillermo Del Toro, This picture is the rarest of the rarest, a sequel that outdoes the original. Now that all the origin business has been taken care of, we plunge directly into the story, which is a monster fest: wonderful, outrageously imagined monsters and beasties, each one more frightening and strangely beautiful than the last. The story is a standard Hobbit-like battle of good vs. evil, So it doesn't matter much, but the film itself is a magical feast for the eyes and also unexpectedly funny and tender.


Chapter 27
Jared Leto, Linsday Lohan
Pointless. This plodding, glacially challenged snore fest is borderline offensive: a minute by minute account of the days leading up to the murder of John Lennon. Leto too effectively plays Mark David Chapman, a self absorbed creep who at first is enamored with the formal Beatle, and then through contrived circumstances, decides to gun him down. Lennon himself is a mere shadow. The film attempts to depict this diseased killer's state of mind. Personally, I was much more interested in Lennon's state of mind just before this asshole shot him. This movie rewards him with just what he wanted: immortality, just like his former hero. He doesn't deserve it.


The Incredible Hulk
Edward Norton, William Hurt
Of the two Marvel comics vehicles this summer, this is the weaker one. The formula is in place: A-List actors in an action-filled popcorn movie. The first half, depicting Norton as the eternally suffering Bruce Banner in South America, desperately learning how to control his anger which could lead to freeing the monster inside him is fun and absorbing. Norton does a nice job humanizing the proceedings. But almost the instant when he shows up stateside in the second half, the CGI generated Hulk steals the show, along with endless gunfire, explosions and even uglier monsters for Hulk to smash. Too bad, because they really had something there for a minute.

Fair Fourth

Another July 4th bites the dust. My two sons and I were trying to avoid the usual crush of crowds in NY, and decided to view the Independence day fireworks from another vantage point: the New Jersey State Fair.

Do you remember the State Fairs of your youth? I do. Stinky affairs. My family would go to the south each summer during vacation to visit relatives and inevitably visit the farm animals, lame rides, overly expensive carnival games and freak shows. My family never had much money, so my main experience was simply passing by stalls, looking at prize winning pigs, blue ribbon roosters and the like, and yes, experiencing that darn smell. The thing I remember the most were the tiny cots in between the animal stalls where the farmers and their families slept. If you got to the fair early enough, as you checked out the animals, you'd still see little Jimmy snoring next to his families' prize cow. I always assumed that the reason for this was that they simply couldn't afford accommodations once they came to the fair to show off of their livestock, but it didn't seem sad to me. It seemed touching.

The New Jersey Fair seemed different; all I saw were cheap rides. But the kids and the Leopard had great fun despite the cheesy surroundings.

One attraction was for .50 you could view the world's smallest horse. It was on a platform surrounded by bales of hay. I paid my money and walked up the stairs to a pit, and down there was a small pony. It was indeed disconcertingly small but not shockingly so, which is what the exaggerated posters surrounding the display suggested. It was standing, staring blankly into space, while spectators dropped loose straws of hay on his head.

As I was leaving the exhibit, I was asked what I thought of what I saw and all I could say was "Kinda sad". We all grasped hands and continued to stroll, checking out the crowds, the lights, the sights and the sounds. Sure enough, here was another display, "World's Largest Horse". I found myself digging immediately into my pocket for loose change.

That's what fairs are about.

The Job Search Goes On

Being a freelance designer can be a lonely and frustrating experience. I consider myself to be one of those type of people who prefers to be an employee, sticking around a company for years and possibly moving up in the ranks.

The order of the day in my business, and I gather in in the whole corporate world---is freelance. It's cheaper--no benefits, and you can fire someone for any reason when you're done with them with no legal repercussions.

The Leopard has worked at well known places for up to 6-8 months as freelancer and then told the project has ended with no ceremony. I usually work longer than is initially projected, but it sucks. You have to be a wizard of economizing in order to stay on your bills--they're still consistent even if your job isn't.

I just got off a freelancing job at a prominent advertising agency. I was really happy and it seemed like things were turning around. I was told they wanted to keep me on as a freelancer for month and if I did well, they'd bring me on as a staffer.

Well, the month went by and I was praised for my work, but lo and behold, the client was having internal problems and cut their budget on the project.--They couldn't bring me on.

So now I'm back to pounding the pavement.

I've been fortunate, I know, that I've been able to work at all. But if this is the way things will be looking in the future, It's gonna be a long summer.

Parking Blues

Much has already been written about the ungodly parking situation in New York,  but because of my current mood, I'll add to the glut.

The Leopard has paid over $1000 to the city and had my car towed twice in the last two years. Why? Because a sign wasn't clearly marked; because I got out to my car at 8:30 in the morning a moment too late; because I was two inches closer to a fireplug then the law allows. 

Now most people say that you shouldn't have a car in New York, anyway. True. 

But I actually live in New Jersey and I drive into the city only occasionally; and even then, I get zapped.

The only way I can get around things is to drive around the neighborhoods from 20 to 40 minutes until I can catch a break. Often this means squeezing into a super tight space, waiting for some slow poke to move out of a space, or lining up on the opposite of the street 

and waiting for an additional hour until a space is free. 

I once worked with the great caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. He was 99 years old at the time (He died a year later). He was famous for his dead-on illustrations of Broadway stars and celebrities for the New York Times. He lived in NY most of his life and as part of his job, he went to a play almost every night. 

He drove around the city in this Gi-normous vintage Cadillac.  

He once told me that in all his  years, he always found a space right near the theater he was attending.

That's what I call some bitchin' car karma.