Buster Keaton/Wheels/Gears

To say “weird,” and for no reason, except maybe to keep the blog blogging by pulling from the archives, recycling old material, I was thinking about posting this illustration of Buster Keaton from 2009.

But it’s also weird how life is cyclical and synchronous. Watch this space for more on that.

I randomly posted it to Tumblr as well not too long ago and it got more than a handful of notes, which was interesting to see and follow in the wake of, to see the kinds of aesthetics it fit, if you click around in the notes.

Also randomly(?) I recently listened to Buster Keaton on Studs Terkel, but to me it was kind of boring so I used it to help me fall asleep.

Hot and Cold


Drew this last Thursday, the day after the C. Hebdo attack. This tweet struck me in part because of the hot take vs. cold bodies setup, as a way to measure time, and as a way to allude to the aggression human beings feel as they try to communicate with each other, urgently, aggressively, clumsily, and also because the other hot topic of conversation on the internet that morning in my internet social media "circles" was how the weather was across much of the country was extremely cold. It struck me that there are different times for everything, and at the same time, of course, timing is everything. When it's cold and dark, like in the winter, or in times of fear and violence, one of the things it's good to do is to just sit together, rest for a while, silently or just saying what's necessary, nothing more, giving everybody as much space as they need to heal and be sane, but maybe sitting a little closer than usual, to fit a few more, come on in, sit down, there's plenty of space. Taking everything a little more slowly, sharing things, good food, warmth, pleasant sounds or silence, seeing and being seen, in a sort of animal togetherness, out of the wind.

(link to original tweet)

Mirrors of Nature

Here's some diagrams I drew while reading Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty last year. I don't expect these diagrams will necessarily make much sense to anyone since I'm using my own, like, private language, which is still under construction. Nor will they clear up anything about the book, which is anyways already pretty clear, I think. In other words, I didn't draw them to illustrate the book. (Though I would like to do more comics or diagrams to clearly illustrate philosophy or nonfiction books someday. If you're looking to put out an edition of Mirror of Nature with illustrations by Kevin H, please give me a call!) But these fall more in the category of "inspired by" or notes to myself. All the stuff about dialectics are my own ideas and I'm not even sure I know what I'm talking about yet. Ideally I would type out some paragraphs trying to explain what you're looking at, but I think I'll just put them up as is for now. 






Bona 1



I re-drew this from Kona #1. 
Drawn by Sam Glanzman, written by Lionel Ziprin


next pages:





















This is a available in print in "The Half Men."


Books of Earth 2

Still trying to sort through my stack of stuff to sort through. I kind of cheated this time and instead of picking off the top of the stack, I just drew from 3 comics that I already thought were pretty great and wanted to plug. Mascots especially I haven't heard anything about (not that I read everything). I loved it, and if you're the kind of person that this kind of thing might appeal to, I highly recommend it. It lands a tricky acrobatic mix of poetry, graphic design, painting, and general sketchbook goofballery.



Sleeper Car
by Theo Ellsworth
-"Norman Eight's Left Arm"

Mascots
by Ray Fenwick
-SUPER GOOD

Papercutter 15
by Various
-Great sci-fi story with a long name by Jonas Madden-Connor.

Books of Earth

I have piles and piles of books and comics to sort through. It would be nice to make some kind of peaceful and productive project out of this situation. Like maybe I could do a drawing of something from each book, or at least the books I enjoyed and want to plug.

Anyways, these were the top two on the pile. I really enjoyed both.

Edison Steelhead by Renee French

Inside the Slow Spiral by Jon Allen (the full story is online)