“Obamage” by [sic]

To download the full image (2.3MB JPEG)

Or download the obamage.zip file (2.3MB zipped JPG)

For more information and pictures on this mural + the overall iheart project,  check out the website.

For more information and pictures on this mural + the overall iheart project,  check out the website.

Wow. Blu’s use of structure and location is amazing. Worth viewing William Kentridge in context.

Here’s a link to Blu’s website.

taken with old school iphone version 1

Author’s Note: This is a republished historical post after the Feb2008 relaunch of Soulincode:

The Revolutionary Voices panel held February 26, 2005 @ NYU:

The panel included:

Chuck D, Hank Shocklee, Daddy O, Fab Five Freddy, Vernon Reid and Will Calhoun (Living Colour), two S1W body guards

Some rough notes (these are not direct quotes):

Play your lane.
-Daddy O

He was outlining that the key to making our way in life is to make sure you are focused on doing what you are naturally here to do. Surround yourself with people who will call on you when you’re swaying out of that lane. This is not to say you do the same thing for your whole life, only that in any given moment of time, there is a natural lane in which to travel, both for the individual and groups that individual works within.

How do you sell your soul to a soul-less nation? Give it away.
-Chuck D

When everything is commodified before it can mature, where the soul is sucked out in consumption economy, how can you sell without selling out?

Smart people figure out how to survive in everyday society, they become silent…but you have to reveal everything that comes your way.
-Chuck D

Survival and profit instincts of an intelligent but less activist human being will suggest silence in the face of wrongful actions. Bystander apathy. Speak out, cuz the next one taken away might be you.

Once we move beyond thinking of ourselves first, a higher plane of consciousness is possible.
-Hank Shocklee

This quote may seem self-evident, but a few notes…first, a major percentage of humans never truly come face to face and attempt to address this idea in true sense of action and thought. Second, how many hip-hop artists speak or create songs in these terms today?

The real estate of the millenium is minds. The real estate is in you.
-Chuck D

Protect your dome.
-S1W bodyguard

Commenting that back in the 80s, it was about forming your own dome around you in terms of your friends and society, to fight against encroaching powers taking over culture. Now those forces are moving into the last frontier, your own mind. One has to learn how to protect the dome of our mind and senses from the onslaught.

circa 2004, by [sic]

Author’s Note: This is a republished historical post after the Feb 2008 relaunch of Soulincode:

Graphic Novel:

A graphic novel is a novel or novella done in the medium of comics. It is typically a long-form work rather than a short publication such as an individual comic book, analogous to a novel rather than a short story. A graphic novel need not be a complete work unto itself, much as some novels are merely installments of an even longer work. When a graphic novel is a reprint of stories from a periodical publication, it is referred to as a trade paperback.

The term is also used by creators and readers who want to differentiate their work from lighter works intended for children.
Source: Wikipedia

At the time of the pioneering graphic novelists, I was still a child, an avid comics fan with a monthly subscription to many titles. Back then, I paid more attention to my favorite illustrators than writers: John Byrne, Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane. Neal Adams, Norm Breyfogle. My focus on writers rested mostly on the rule that they better provide enough story opportunities for my artists to shine.

Then I began to notice that some of these illustrators were also writers, and more importantly, that a even a great illustrator cannot hide a bad story. And then a bomb dropped within my understanding of comics as literature: Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. In this radical Batman story, an aging Bruce Wayne brings his alter-ego out of retirement to face a more deadly and violent Gotham City. Gotham is a seedy pit of apocalyptic despair, Superman a tool of the state who eventually abides by the powers-that-be to do battle with his old friend Batman…for a kid who grew up a fan of Superman as the purest hero of mankind, this kind of sotry is a reality shock. In Frank Miller’s Gotham, good and evil exist in the grey zone, characters age and die spectacularly, and reflections of real geopolitics are integral to the plot.

As a story with weight and meaning, the Dark Knight Returns, along with titles like Alan Moore’s “The Watchmen”, began laying the groundwork for the evolution of comics into graphic novels, a new style of 20th century literature.  Where traditional novels rely on letters and words within sentences for symbolic representation, graphic novels and comics use a visual language which smoothly combines pictorial and textual symbols in a unified narrative form. The best graphic novels are a cross between narrative poetry and graphic design, mixed with an understanding of novel and cinematic story principles. As narrative poetry, a graphic novel’s textual story elements must be condensed, controlled, and rhythmic within a limited page space. As a graphic design, care must be taken to integrate panels, characters, landscapes, and the graphical symbols into a unified story design across time. What leads to what, where does the audience eye move on the page, and how does the “reading” relate to the flow of text meeting image?

In terms of book meets cinema, words, graphics, panels, dialogue, and action blur and merge in a reader’s head as the pages turn; frame to frame, the authors (writer and artist) create a continuous understanding of a visual/textual story in motion. Some graphic novels, such as Alan Moore’s Watchmen, or the stories and graphics of Moebius, read cover to cover like a film storyboard sequence. At the same time, unlike cinema, the graphic novel explodes the frame/screen at times. Graphic novel panels and subpanels can be fractured, overlaid, the “frame” or “window” expanding and contracting to fit the flow and scenes. In addition, whereas the viewer of a film is locked into a 24 frame per second timecode lockstep of images, a graphic novel reader only sees keyframes of action, his/her mind filling in much of the implied motion and action of the story.

Graphic novels, comics and Japanese manga/anime represent a significant contribution to the postmodern conception of hero and myth. Only in the past few years has the entertainment market brought the more traditional aspects of this subculture to the mass market: Spiderman, The Hulk, Daredevil, The Punisher, Hellboy – all comic book characters and stories brought to the big screen. The more mainstream titles fit well into traditional epics, clear black and white divisions of heroes and villains, storylines that reinforce the American definitions of good and evil.

But there is a more complex, eye-opening underground within the graphic novel sphere, with its writers and artists overtly and covertly affecting postmodern culture. Artists like Moebius are long-time contributors to core visual and story concepts in Hollywood films like “Alien”, “Tron”, “Dune”, “The Fifth Element”, “The Abyss”, and “Blade Runner”.

Matrix creators, the Wachowski brothers, who used to write for Marvel Comics, hired Geof Darrow to create many of the visual designs for the movie. As well, the entire Matrix movie was storyboarded by comic book artists in a graphic novel style, where the panels represented keyframes of the script’s beats. This comic format not only served to inform the way the story and cinematography made it on-screen, it at first provided a strong sell-point to Hollywood executives who needed a clear easy-to-understand vision to help them visualize and understand such an ambitious film project. Later on, the brothers went on to make Matrix off-shoots that harken back to their comics and anime passions: Animatrix, animated shorts by top Japanese writers and animators that expand Matrix story, and Matrix Comics under the Burlyman label. Example of storyboard vs film sequences are shown below:

Darren Aronofsky, writer and director of “Pi”, modeled his film’s aesthetic on Frank Miller’s “Sin City” graphic novel, a noir design with black and white, no grey tones whatsoever. Here are two shots, one showing a page from Miller’s Sin City, the other frames from Aronofsky’s “Pi”:

Why are so many filmmakers, designers, writers, animators, and artists moving in these same circles of thought? The answer is easier explored via direct experience exploring the vast intellectual and story reaches of these productions. In particular, with the titles I link to via the cover images at the top of this post, there is a focus on fantasy, science fiction, cyberpunk, sociopolitics, metaphysics and ways of seeing.

Much of these art forms harken back to archetypal mythologies; comic characters are complex yet graphically more simple than film or video. In this space between reality and symbolic representation lies a more fluid space to explore conscious and subconscious, where viewers have an easier time looking at drawings as a mixture of fantasy and reality. Only video games can come close to representing a form of story and media as deeply entrenched in this postmodern experience of reality.

In addition to the wide creative palette of graphic novels, the form, medium and distribution via print follows a long history of propagating fringe cultural ideas ahead of their time. The fact that this artform is relegated by most cultural critics to kids pulp fiction acts as an advantage for its subcultural camoflauge. As guerilla semiotics, comics exist beneath-the-radar as coded narratives embedded within the product streams of capital. They are collectible items in the form of serials, relatively cheap and readily accessible to youth populations. The graphic novel can function as cultural cryptography, often filled with avantgarde ideas set within populist frameworks.

Comics and graphic novels absorb and explore many of the core concepts of 20th century art movements focused on pushing perceptions of space and time.  Sequence, text, and picture morph between reality memory and dream,  one-point perspective suddenly flips into multiples.   As sequential art, this flow is often seamless for the human mind to absorb and build upon, received in pieces but constructed into a unified whole.

Thus we see the entry of graphic novels and comics into academia for study as a powerful new mode of literature and human communication.   With film, television, comics and video games as the media powers of the 20th century, we shall see what comes next in the 21st.

——————

The header image of this post shows a cross-section of major titles to check out, from authors Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Scott McCloud, Warren Ellis, and Grant Morrison. The links lead to Amazon entries for each title, where you can learn more. Below is further reading on the topic of graphic novels:

Wired Article: Moebius : Jean Giraud’s stunning cartoons scan like movies

Ugo.com : Interview of BurlyMan Matrix Comics Spencer Lamm interview with

Integrative Arts 10 : Post-Modern Graphic Novels

New York Times Magazine: Not Funnies, a look at the more novelistic and less hero/myth oriented graphic novelists like Art Spiegelman, Seth, etc.

Author’s Note: This is a republished historical post after the Feb 2008 relaunch of Soulincode:

So we hear that the end of history is nigh, or maybe this is just a lull in originality…in any case, it’s clear that a lot of companies across the style spectrum are profiting from product focused on the retro past. Nike and other major shoe companies reproduce and re-release famous old shoe models, Izod and Ocean Pacific come back with their old 80s clothes for nostalgia seekers.

Yet nothing of the sort happens in the automotive industry; we see a few nice concept cars, then a massive majority of cookie cutter, wind-tunnel designed models on the market, plus a few designs derivative of classics like the popular Chrysler PT Cruiser. America’s car culture is strong; a Google Image search for “classic cars” shows what’s going on out there in terms of these car fetish people keeping up their old roadsters.

THE IDEA:
Car companies should produce remakes of their most popular historical models, same shell design, same interior with a few updated core materials, and update all the internal machinery and electronics so it’s road-ready for current state of the industry, also create hybrids or electric versions whenever possible.

Oh yeah, and a derivative idea is to “lifestyle” them for all those vicarious livers out there who want the hip-hop mod car like see in Dub, or retro style like Ford Woody surf car seen in the pic above. This trend is already underway, where Detroit is starting to offer bling upgrades upon purchase, 20″ chrome rims and such.