Antiques Creepshow - Saxy Clown

As a companion piece to yesterday's offering, The Velvet Clown, Phil Are GO! is proud to be able to offer this Jpeg of a photo of a painting, unearthed in Michigan City, Indiana. Entitled The Saxy Clown, this piece shows us a deeper, more soulful side of clown painting.

At first, one sees the clown's stunted arms, like those of a dinosaur. Was our little punchinello a thalidomide baby? Then your eye is drawn to the compelling black funnel of the saxophone's bell. But wait! The perspective is wrong. The mouth of the instrument must be a flat sticker or decal placed over the bell of the sax. It seems no one wants to hear the clown's mournful refrain of rejection. This cruel world would rather listen to the flat, insincere music of hypocrisy. This is a deft metaphor for the lack of respect that clowning receives from the public.

As anyone who has ever picked up a contra bassoon can explain, one can either smile or play a wind instrument, but not both at the same time. Today's clown painting shows us a clown smiling sadly while sadly playing a saxophone sadly. Maybe the poor clown would have more luck if he used a mouthpiece, instead of blowing directly into the neck of the instrument? What note is played when you simply clamp down a row of keys with all four fingers? A note in the key of weeping. It is to the uncredited artist's credit that he/she allows these profound misunderstandings to be the vector of emotional poignancy in the piece. Most significantly, this painting pulls at our emotions by displaying the artist's deep, sincere ignorance of music, and what could be sadder than that?

And yet, the skill with which the clown's lips are rendered conveys a deep familiarity with the way light glistens on a mouth covered with red greasepaint. Music may be a closed book to this artist, but it seems that he or she has more than a passing familiarity with clown lips.

If you click through the picture to the left, you will enjoy a large version of the image where can be made out the price sticker. Thirty dollars. That's all the store was asking. Surely this lonely, misshapen creature with Groucho eyebrows can find a welcome home on your hard drive for less than that? Please bid generously on today's offering before right-click saving the file. Won't you give this misbegotten a wall to hang on, in your computer? We begin the bidding at a crumpled up post-it note.

Antiques Creepshow - Velvet Clown

Today, we an appreciation of this majestic clown painting, deftly executed on the finest black velveteen. The artist's name is difficult to make out, but the P.A.G. Bureau of Scribbles and Squinting At Them (BSSAT) has determined that the creator of this piece was one of the following...

-Me Trombon, the incisive Clown Horrorist from East germany. He was active in the late seventies, until his much-celebrated suicide in 1982.

-Mr. Trinschion, one of the "lunch hour" school of Clownists from France, all of whose paintings were created, from start to finish, in one lunch hour.

-Ms. Toloon, the great velvet clown originator. The majority of her work was focused on clowns, but as her skills matured, she broadened her scope into the areas of punchinellos, harlequins, fools, and cannibals. Her love of the oil-on-velvet medium was credited to "the way the fibers clump together under the paint, as if they're afraid of her subject matter". This last was from an interview with Toloon in the May 1955 issue of ArtCrime magazine.

Phil Are GO! has been fortunate in the opportunity to photograph this piece, found at an antique gallery in Arlington Heights, IL. The photograph has been lovingly color corrected to no particular standard, then gently compressed to a Jpeg file of the luxurious 445Kb size.

Your family will treasure this file for generations. They'll build wonderful memories around the Jpeg of the photograph of the painting, wondering at the clown's toilet seat-shaped muzzle, his drunken half-lidded eyes, his strange black teeth, and his general malformed asymmetry. They'll bathe in the reflected glow of the painting's four vivid colors. But most of all, you'll enjoy the conversations that spring up around speculation of the three features on his bottom lip. What are these? Are they tiny fingers, perhaps of a baby, trying to escape the mouth of the clown? Are they cocktail wieners? We will never know, because art defies definition. This painting is without question, a possible piece of art.

Won't you bid on this heirloom Jpeg? Phil Are Go! has entertained bids of up to several paperclips and half a bag of Skittles, but surely a file of this importance deserves better. Please place your bid before right-click-saving the picture.

P.A.G. galleries thanks all readers for their continued patronage or something.

Baby Lecture

Joke #1 - "Okay everyone, no need to crowd. Professor Snuggy Wuggums will talk to each one of you about your thesis paper in turn."

Joke #2 - Gina was skeptical at first, but she'd been impressed. Despite his lack of experience, she liked his stance on women's rights and his nap-time platform. Senator Baby was winning her over.

Joke #3 - "We found this growth in the abdominal cavity of one of our female patients, believed to have had some kind of contact with a male person's "icky wicky parts" some months earlier. It had parasitically attached itself to the woman's bloodstream, which it used for nutrition as well as defecation. Shield your vaginas, everyone. We don't yet understand all of it's powers."

Joke #4 - Our final exhibit is called "baby". It was donated to the museum as part of an estate donation by an anonymous benefactor of loose morals. Would anyone like to burp the piece?

Joke #5 - Our newest patient has myriad disorders. He has poor motor skills, lacks any emotional control, is prone to outbursts of rage, and seems totally unable to feed himself. We've been unable to contact his wife regarding his medical history, so we're assuming he's just a selfish idiot. He's decided to run for Governor of Illinois in the fall, and hopes he can count on your multiple votes.

Joke #6 - "And here we see our newest model, Baby 2.0. I think you'll find it's list of features so appealing and easy to live with that your current baby seems annoying and unacceptable by comparison. I can't say I blame you. baby 2.0 is a real winner!"

[Commenter jokes will be added to the post.]

Sue joked thusly: "...and THAT, my friends, is why this product is on the Top Shelf. I know, Doesn't seem like it's worth the price. Elizabeth, if you could stop stepping on the Bottom Shelf product..."

Craig joked like so: "That comes out of where?"

 ...and thus:

"Well done, everyone. Here at the Tobacco Institute, we've found that babies respond well to smoke blown in the their face, especially in combination with irritated scowling."

 ...and additionally...

"Here at Mainway Novelties and Child Care Items, we've determined that child-safe cribs should have rails no more than four inches above the mattress surface. I mean, who is this kid, Sir Edmund Hillary? You see what I mean? He'll never get over that!"



Well-commented, jokers! I mean well-joked, commenters!

-Mgmt.

GE Scandanavian Console - Rocking out.

Here's an ad for a G.E. console stereo. It looks pretty cool, and it makes me slightly sad that stereos don't look this slick any more. If I found one of these today, it'd be nice to hollow it out and fill it with all-modern components (assuming the old old gear didn't work or sounded terrible).

We can , however, marvel at the interesting marketing of the thing. "If your living room has that blond, blue-eyed look...". This is their clever way of describing Scandinavian design, which, in case you didn't kow, is characterized by clean, simple lines and hardwood construction.

Using something as obvious as racial differences to describe a country would be forbidden now. The company would be terrified of being sued for discrimination somehow. To recognize genetic differences in people, no matter how obvious, is racist. We in the enlightened future know this.Nobody in their right mind would make the observation that Scandinavians are generally fairer-haired or predominantly blue-eyed without first reciting the preamble "Now, I'm not saying there's anything right or wrong with it, and I don't mean to disenfranchise those in the world that are not of the genetic strain I am about to describe, but...". That would make some clumsy ad copy.

Weird racial stuff aside, questions abound.

What's with the stone? Adam Carolla plays a game on his podcast called "rich man, poor man", where people try to think of lifestyle features that are common only among the very rich or very poor. For example, eating very small meals, served raw. I think having stone walls in your house would be a good one. Was this house built in a cave? The walls aren't just stone, like quarry stone. They're rocks. You could scale the wall to change a light bulb if you had to. You could even do it without putting on special shoes. It looks pretty great, but the risk of having centipedes waltzing out of the crevices and running off with tortilla chips during a dinner party would be a serious turnoff. I mean, I can spare a chip or two, but centipedes are just gross is all.*

Why is everyone sitting outside while the stereo cranks away on the other side of a glass wall? Is it to demonstrate the rich, big sound that the console produces? Maybe it's so loud that, even at the lowest setting, you have to sit outside your cave to enjoy it at all? Know what, though? If it was really loud, it'd just break the glass with the huge big sounds of Abba. Wups! This is 1966. I meant "the huge big sounds of Ikea Flatpack and The Abbas".**

*Now, I'm not saying there's anything right or wrong with it, and I don't mean to disenfranchise those in the world that have more than ten legs, but centipedes really are disgusting and I hate them as often as possible. If you are a centipede, I'm sorry but I hate you and want to kill you, not that there's anything wrong with you.

**The P.A.G. Research and Google Department could find no evidence of pop music in Norway or Sweden before 1972, so I just make up a name that sounded kind of Norse and sixtiesish.

Wall of Meters - Troy and Vance.

Joke#1 -"Troy, I've been thinking. I know it's not what we agreed upon when we moved in together, but I must follow my heart. I think this wall over here should remain free of meters. I'd like to put up some gauges instead."

Joke #2 - "God-DAMMIT, Troy, would you stop relaxing at me!?"

Joke #3 - "Gosh, science is boring. Tell you what, Troy. I'll go through this door and wait on the other side of the wall, and you put whateeeeeeever you want through one of these holes  and I'll try and guess what it is with my eyes closed, okay?."

Joke #4 - "Well, maintenance was here this weekend, and our request came through. To break up the tension of monitoring the Neutrino Detection Array, they've installed these Erotic Insertion Apertures in this previously unused wall here. I guess we didn't need so many, but things can get pretty crazy down here in Neutrino Detection, right?"

Joke #5 - A peek inside Milton Bradley's skunkworks during the development phase of the challenging new play-anywhere game, "Tic tac toe toe toe toe toe toe toe toe toe toe toe toe toe toe toe toe toe toe".

Joke #6 - "Come over here... Tiger. Err, I mean, uuh, Panthera Tigris."

Joke #7 - "Sooo, Troy. How was your weekly recreational period? Carefully measured, I hope."

Joke #8 - "Vance, I hope that odd projection halfway down your thigh is what I think it is."

Joke #9 - "The tension was unbearable. Nano-scale practical jokes could be subtle but humiliating. Neither researcher wanted to be the first to try out the new chair."

Joke #10 - "Well, Vance, how does it feel to be part of the first team to mathematically quantify the personality disorders of Mel Gibson?"

Joke #11 - Thank god you're here, Troy. I didn't know who else to call. About five hours ago, there I was, just sitting there, like usual, and one of the meters over there MOVED a little bit! I mean, it could have been just a slight voltage dip or something, but I think we should launch the missiles."

Joke #12 - Ah, Troy. You're here. I knew exactly when you'd arrive. Believe it or not, I've been monitoring your progress."

Joke #13 - "Mmmmmm. Meter number 104 indicates that you look goooood today, Vance."

Joke #14 - "You know Vance, life isn't all clip boards and gauges. Why don't you pull up a slice of table? Let's wrap."

New Ideas from the Inventors - Devices of Questionable Practicality.

This morning as I walked through the lobby at GO! towers, I was greeted by an excited staffer from the Art and Avoiding Creating New Art department. She informed me that we now have a header for "inventions" posts. Pretty slick, huh? It refers to "the inventors" like they're geniuses who sit all day in some kind of invention chamber, building crucial stuff, and not pipefitters and bank tellers trying to convince the world it needs their ridiculous doodad that they knocked together in their garage. Let's perpetuate that misconception (the one about the chamber full of geniuses) by stealing this graphic as our invention header.

End the drudgery of glove-wearing forever with this brief-case mitt! You can keep your hand warm while carry your brief-case. See? Now all we need is some kind of inventor to invent us a steering-wheel mitt, a pencil mitt and a coffee-mug mitt. Imagine all the lost hours you can reclaim, previously spent enduring the torture of putting your gloves on... not to mention the anguish of pulling them off again later! The brief-case mitt needs some kind of  water-tight cuff at the top, or perhaps a system of gutters or drainage apparatus, to prevent the mitt from filling-up with rain-water. Almost perfect, The Inventors!

Being assigned to a post on Earth can be a real chore. Earth's tiny yellow sun barely dribbles out any ultraviolet radiation at all, especially in the delicious, carapace-nourishing 320 nanometer spectrum. How to these pathetic humans get by on so little 320nm exposure? We'll never know! However, you can care for your various personal surfaces by imitating their wasteful "sleep period" under this wonderful heat lamp array. Easily disguised as an ordinary interrogation apparatus, you'll spend hours soaking up sweet, sweet UV rays while you telepathically transmit your findings back to the mother ship. Insignificant humans, prepare to be assimilated by a tan, healthy superior life form!

Does your teen spend hours on the gigantic phone, while enormous dishes go un-washed and huge lawnmower goes un-pushed? Well, this phone meter lets you carefully tabulate the message units consumed, so you can become only as angry as needed. Device fits unobtrusively on any unoccupied ping-pong table and dialing holes fit a standard knee or forehead. Noise created by mechanism may necessitate the purchase of an extra long cord to reach minimum audible radius (M.A.R.) for the handset.

Bring the fun back to construction with this handy nail rifle! "Shooting up the place" has never meant building a room addition until now. Simply load the rifle with the appropriate cartridge, based on nail size, type and thickness of material and blam your wall into existence. Rifle is easily differentiated from a real rifle by small inscription "not a real rifle" just inside the mouth of the barrel. Can also be used to turn off televisions or neighbor's pets. Normal use may attract unwanted attention from local authorities.

Oldsmobile 88 - Brushed for speed.

Hey! Look everyone! Another car ad! This one shows the happy motorists zipping through a smeary wonderland of speed. Was the car fast? It was probably competitive for the time, with around 300 horsepower. But the handling was also probably competitive for the time, meaning that should your motor journey require you to turn, you'd scratch the door handles on the pavement.

Americans have seemingly always preferred a smooth ride to good handling. Even European cars, when "tuned" for the American market, are almost always lifted a bit onto taller, squishier suspensions that make the car wallow like a pig around corners. Apparently all drivers in the U.S. are eighty years old.

Nice painting. The background reminds me of my old job. I used to be a background painter at an animation studio (Just for clarity: If the character drawings are the actors, the backgrounds are the scenery).

When a character was running along and the camera needed to travel with the character, the background had to move behind  the character, who remained in the center of the frame. Think of Fred Flintstone running through his endless living room, where the same couch keeps going by. This type of background is called a "pan", because the BG is wider than a sheet of animation paper, allowing it to be "panned" across the camera stand behind the character. A pan BG could be anywhere from two to six or so times the width of a normal drawing. The trick was that the left and right ends of the BG had to be identical, so that when the camera operator got to the end of the BG, he could start again at the opposite end, looping the pan as many time as was needed.

The end result was the Fred Flintstone effect, where the background slid by endlessly, even showing you the same doorway or couch over and over again. If you think about it, Fred must have been running in circles.

To avoid painting super-long backgrounds, which can be expensive, another approach is to just paint a "zip pan". A zip pan only needs to be maybe two or three times normal width, and is painted with smeary horizontal streaks, like we see in this ad. Again, it's a good idea to make both ends similar, but not necessarily identical. A zip pan is faster to paint, and as a result, cheaper. In order for the smeary look to work, a zip pan needs to go by really fast. Also, it's harder to recognize a specific brush stroke going by repeatedly, so you can avoid the Flintstone effect.

You see a LOT of zip pans in Anime. The japanese love zip pans. Sometimes, they're so cheaply done they're just two alternating frames of smeariness flickering away behind the character. Dragonball Z had more zip pans than trees in their backgrounds.

The characters' eyes look like they're made out of coal.

I reckon she knows where he keeps his carrot nose.