A comic tends to be a small enough, personal enough, medium that a creator can just make art, tell stories, and see if anyone wants to read them. Not having to be liked is enormously liberating. The comic is, joyfully, a bastard medium that has borrowed its vocabulary and ideas from literature, science fiction, poetry, fine art, diaries, film, and illustration. It would be nice to think that comics, and those of us who come from a comics background, bring something special to film. An insouciance, perhaps, or a willingness to do our learning and experimenting in public.
The reason you love sneakers changes as you grow. Some people follow players and cop the signature shoe. In high school, it’s a style thing. And when you get your first job, you buy every Jordan in sight just to make up for lost time or cheap parents. But when you’re a ten-year-old, there’s one reason you buy J’s: to jump higher.
In 8th grade it was all about the Penny Hardaway’s.
In high school it was about coordinating my kicks with my outfits, and searching for a pair that stood out, that no else had, like my North Carolina blue Cortez’s.
When I was pushing in shopping carts at Winn-Dixie and finally starting to earn my own scratch, it was greed. Buying as many kicks as I could swipe my debit card through at Champs Sports.
And yeah, at 10 it was all about the dream of jumping higher.
Now J’s are all about being the only pair of kicks that don’t aggravate my corn.
Blaise Matuidi has many admirers. Us and Carlo Ancelloti among them.
But he also has a surprising fan boy.
Pep Guardiola.
At first glance, Blaise doesn’t possess the ideal qualities of a Pep Guardiola player. His technique on the ball can be clumsy. His passing range is limited. Yet Blaise still managed to leave an impression on Pep.
Former Clairefontaine youth coach Francisco Filho shares the story:
“We had just finished a tournament in Las Palmas. We won. Pep Guardiola was there, on holiday. Alongside his brother, who was organising the tournament, we dined together. He saw our match and he said to me: ‘When I will be manager (he was still playing in Qatar at the time), I want a player like your #6.’ Who was it? Blaise Matuidi.”
For a writer I associate so much with writing from the subconscious I was surprised to discover Ray Bradbury’s outlines for the Martian Chronicles.
The handwritten Martian Chronicles outline.Typed version. The first four chapters match the handwritten version exactly.
I’m astounded at Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Touponce’s dedication to the research and cataloging of Ray Bradbury’s fiction writing career.
But it’s like Mr. Bradbury says:
Everything I do is a work of love. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t do it. I would like for people to say of me, ‘Bradbury’s books are all his children. Go to the library and meet his family.’
Both practices are rapid movements of the pen, marker or pencil, attempting to capture a form quickly.
A tag though is made to be seen. It’s intent is to pay homage to the creator.
Gesture drawing is an exercise. Their intent is to loosen up the artist, and then hit the wastebasket.
It is only action, the gesture, that you are trying to respond to here, not the details of the structure. You must discover – and feel – that the gesture is dynamic, moving, not static. Gesture has no precise edges, no exact shape, no jelled form. The forms are in the act of changing. Gesture is movement in space.
A reminder: Don’t fret. It’s fine to go through reams of paper:
Feel free to use a great deal of paper and do not ever worry about ‘spoiling’ it – that is one of our reasons for using cheap paper. I notice that students working at their best, thinking only of the gesture and not of making pictures, often throw their drawings into the trash-can without even looking at them. A few should be kept and dated as a record of your progress, but the rest may be tossed aside as carelessly as yesterday’s newspaper. Results are best when they come from the right kind of un-self-conscious effort.
He wears a belt. He holds a sword. He stands heroically.
In Australia though, looking up from the southern hemisphere, Orion’s arrangement in the sky flips upside down. His legend takes on a different meaning.
The Constellation of Orion – seen in the West as a mighty hunter – also has a different interpretation in Australia. That’s partly because the stars are seen ‘upside down’ from the southern hemisphere. Contemporary Australians often pick out the central three stars of Orion’s ‘Belt’ and ‘Sword’ as a rather nicely defined Saucepan!
‘The Yolngu see the three stars of Orion’s Belt as three men sitting in a canoe,’ says Ray Norris, returning to the more ancient traditions, ‘with Betelgeuse and Rigel as the front and back of the canoe.’ Orion’s Sword – comprising fainter stars and the glowing patch of the Orion Nebula – is a fish caught on a fishing line. Norris enthuses: ‘Once you’ve been told this, and you’ve seen it, its actually really dramatic.’
Three men sitting in a canoe. A saucepan. A fish dangling from it’s line.
Switching hemispheres will switch your perspective.
I’ll never look at Orion the same way again.
New life goal: gaze at Orion from the southern hemisphere.
He’s 5ft 6in tall and weighs 10 stone, a healthy height and weight for a well-developed 13-year-old boy. He remains an amiable, slightly goofy figure, resembling in close-up less a hyper-toned modern athlete, more a very clever gerbil with a pocket watch and a tailcoat who knows how to fly an air balloon and drive an old-fashioned car.
I start with very short pieces, usually no more than a handwritten page. I try to focus on something specific: a person, a moment, a place. I do what I ask my students to do when I teach creative writing. I explain to them that such fragments are the first steps to take before constructing a story. I think a writer should observe the real world before imagining a nonexistent one.
In order for the skillful players to have the space with which to work, somebody had to get the ball, and give it to them. The playmakers couldn’t be expected to do the running that was needed, the dirty work, the pressing. Every team had at least two players of this type, if not three.
Juventus of course, had whom many consider to be the greatest mediani of all – Beppe Furino.
Beppe, to the right, in the black and white Juventus stripes
Juventus specialized in mediani, and the greatest of all was Beppe Furino in the 1970s and 1980s. Little Furino, from Palermo in Sicily, ran himself into the ground in order to get the ball to a succession of playmakers such as Franco Causio, Liam Brady and Michel Platini. Yet Furino was not a one-dimensional player. Team-mate Marco Tardelli called him ‘the most tactically intelligent player I have ever seen. He was always close to the ball.’
A mediano doesn’t revel in personal glory. But their trophy cabinets are flush with silver.
The life of a mediano was thus a melancholic one. They were always destined to be the supporting act, straight men, water carriers. They could never be stars and would remain forever in the shadow of their more skillful colleagues. Furino won a record eight titles with Juventus in the 1970s and 1980s, but is rarely mentioned in accounts of those years.
Floodlights and Goalposts 