Garfield minus Garfield

It's been clear for some time that Garfield can be improved by removing Garfield's thought balloons. More recently, it's become clear that Garfield is better still — funnier, richer, stranger — when one removes Garfield.

Let us begin with familiar Garfield territory. A stupid man! A snarky cat!



Alas, the punchline self-destructs: if Garfield himself is indeed good at doing nothing, why must he imply that? Why must he even think? Remove the thought balloon and the scene changes drastically:



Now Garfield's eloquent silence tells us all we need to know about what it's like to be stuck in a comic strip with this man. There's no need for words. But remove Garfield and things are even better:



Now Jon is all alone with his thoughts, such as they are. He's Estragon without Vladimir, or a figure from The Waste Land. He seems to realize that in the final panel, "Looking into the heart of light, the silence."

Reader, try this strategy at home, and see if it gives you a value-added comics experience.

And to the creator of the Garfield-minus-Garfield reading strategy, wherever you might be: Thanks!

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Richard Widmark

December 26, 1914 - March 24, 2008

“Movie audiences fasten on to one aspect of the actor, and then they decide what they want you to be. They think you’re playing yourself. The truth is that the only person who can ever really play himself is a baby.”

Richard Widmark, Actor, Dies at 93 (New York Times)
Scene from Kiss of Death (1947) (YouTube)

[Above: Widmark as Tommy Udo, Victor Mature as Nick Bianco, in Kiss of Death.]

Overheard

Elaine on the phone:

"Now my hair is back to its natural color: 6C."

L'Oréal: because you're worth it.

[Used with permission. Thanks, Elaine!]

All "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)
Musical Assumptions (Elaine's blog)

James Carville's metaphors

I've been collecting and commenting on inept and absurd political metaphors over the past few weeks, but I thought of letting James Carville's recent comparison of Bill Richardson to Judas go by. I still don't understand its supposedly transparent logic. Judas : Jesus :: Bill Richardson : Bill Clinton? Hillary Clinton? Both?

I'm interested though in Carville's defense of his statement as metaphor. He defended it in these terms four times in his conversation yesterday with CNN: "It's a seasonal metaphor I was using"; "I was using a biblical metaphor"; "I wanted to use a very strong metaphor"; "It was a metaphor I was using." Carville never says that it was just a metaphor he was using, but his comments carry that suggestion, as if metaphor were simply a way to underscore one's meaning, and not a statement whose implications are its maker's responsibility. Just words after all, right? Just politics.

Another metaphor in Carville's remarks yesterday had me puzzled:

I mean, you do these things, and people come up and say, you’re comparing and everything else. I wanted — I got one in the wheelhouse and I tagged it.

As I just learned, wheelhouse is (among other things) a metaphor for "a hitter's power zone," and, it seems, one of Carville's pet words. No home run for James Carville this time — just a foul.

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"Modern-Day Proust"

Meet Eric Dressler:

Much like the prolific 19th-century French novelist Marcel Proust, local claims adjustor Eric Dressler generates prodigious volumes of prose, chronicling the most minute details of his life and experiences in a seemingly endless stream of e-mails, friend Kevin Honig reported Monday.

"Proust devoted the last decade of his life to writing In Search of Lost Time, a massive, sprawling, 3,000-page semiautobiographical work that covers 13 volumes," said Honig, Dressler's best friend since college. "Well, the way he spends half his work day sending e-mails, Eric has probably turned out at least that much. I get, like, six or seven a day without fail."

Modern-Day Proust E-Mails Friend Six Times A Day (The Onion)

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

Strained political metaphors of the day

Carpetbagging beaver! Drunken horse! Tired as dogs! From Erica Jong:

We have two great candidates — one a hard working, never give up eager beaver, and one an inspiring, heart-leapingly brilliant stallion. . . .

They're tired. Dog-tired. The stallion makes heart-stopping speeches. And the beaver just beavers along, remembering how she won over upstate New York when everyone called that impossible. And called her a carpetbagger. And the stallion is drunk on his own rhetoric. . . .

We need beavers and we need stallions. Beavers get the work done. Stallions inspire us. And they both have limitations. Stallions have fragile legs (think Barbaro). And beavers are nothing without their teeth.

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Tristan und Isolde, Live in HD

The Metropolitan Opera's current production of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde has had problems, problems, problems, problems. But today's performance, which Elaine and I were fortunate to see as a Live in HD broadcast, was a triumph in all ways — musically, visually, and emotionally. Elaine has already found a detailed review. [Update: She's now written her own.]

The Met's Live in HD might be the most remarkable experience you'll ever have in a multiplex. The broadcasts are available in sixteen countries and one U.S. territory (Puerto Rico). For more information:

The Metropolitan Opera Live in HD

I wish that my friend Aldo Carrasco were here so that I could tell him that I've finally seen Tristan.

Jackie Gleason on creating a character

[Photograph of New York City subway rider by Walker Evans.]

He once told me that the creation of a character "starts with looking at all the people on the subway, figuring out how they might have got that way."

Audrey Meadows, Love, Alice: My Life as a Honeymooner (NY: Crown, 1994)

Spring break explosion

Ah, college life:

Three spring breakers were arrested after an explosion rocked two hotel guests from their bed and shattered the windows of their Daytona Beach Shores hotel room around 2:30 a.m. Friday. . . .

"They're really nice guys, they were just really drunk yesterday . . . We saw 'em before dark and they were so wasted that I don't think they remember doing that."

Spring Breakers Arrested After Dynamite Explodes On Hotel Sundeck (WFTV)

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Puzzling political metaphor of the day

From CNN, an overwritten behind-the-scenes account of Eliot Spitzer's resignation, with salivating journalists, thick air (thick with anticipation, natch), and a barking reporter. And then there's this sentence:

Spitzer had described himself as a political "steamroller." But in the end this proud politician had only crushed himself.

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