Lichtenstein's 'borrowing' still a source of discomfort

Roy Lichtenstein’s “Whaam!” hits me hard, like the fighter plane and missile it depicts, but not in the way the artist intended.

A lithograph of the two-panel work hangs in the Canton Museum of Art’s POP! exhibit through March 6. The first panel shows a plane launching a missile; the second is the explosion of an enemy aircraft. Most people with an interest in pop art of the 1950s and ’60s are familiar with it and know it is modeled after a comic book.

But “modeled after a comic book” is a euphemism. More accurately, “Whaam!” depends entirely on All-American Men of War No. 89, published in 1962 by DC Comics. The original artist is Irv Novick, a workhorse of the industry. Lichtenstein appropriated comic book drawings by Novick and others as his templates, making significantly more money – some might say obscenely more – than the work-for-hire talent who first did the work.

Claiming that Lichtenstein merely copied these artists is an oversimplification. He reworked the originals as he painted. For “Whaam!,” he broke a single image into two and streamlined the finished product. Still, nobody who looks at the inspirations for “Whaam!” or any of Lichtenstein’s other works can fail to see the resemblance.

Lichtenstein’s genius, if you will, was reframing – no pun intended – comic book illustrations and elevating them to high art. He followed Andy Warhol, who did the same with images of soup cans and celebrities. (Warhol also experimented with comic book iconography before Lichtenstein but abandoned it when he saw the latter artist’s work.)

If not for Lichtenstein, most of the appropriated panels would be forgotten today, except by comic aficionados. He is partially responsible for making comic books the subject of academic debate and a format worthy of more ambitious literary efforts. Additionally, the appropriations by Lichtenstein and other pop artists anticipated creative applications of existing work in other fields, such as music, where sampling has further enriched us culturally. He’s had an impact.

So, why does Lichtenstein’s work hit me so hard and leave me so divided?

It’s the lack of credit. One could argue that Lichtenstein didn’t identify Novick because he wasn’t named in the original comic book that Lichtenstein swiped. Yet he invited the comic book’s editor to a gallery show and asked that editor to invite artists who worked for DC, so Lichtenstein had the means to learn Novick’s name. Lichtenstein and Novick also served together during World War II. Whether Lichtenstein was aware, at least initially, that it was his acquaintance’s work he was appropriating is something I haven’t been able to verify.

Credit would have been some comfort to Novick, Tony Abruzzo (whose art inspired Lichtenstein’s “Drowning Girl”) and Ted Galindo (whose work is sampled in “Masterpiece”). But money would have been better.

Even if Lichtenstein had no legal obligation (if anything, he would have owed the copyright holders), he had an ethical one. Long before publishers paid royalties to comic book artists, these craftsmen worked for low page rates, without insurance benefits, ownership of or profits from their work. Many died in poverty. Even the smallest percentage of the money Lichtenstein realized from their efforts would have been life-changing.

Today, after all the principals are dead, at least they receive credit. Novick is mentioned on a placard at the Canton exhibit. And David Barsalou’s Flickr and Facebook pages, both called Deconstructing Lichtenstein, offer exhaustive examples of Lichtenstein’s sources.

Tellingly, the POP! display runs concurrently with another show at the museum, “Marvelocity,” which spotlights Alex Ross. A highly regarded artist who applies photo-realism to renditions of superheroes, Ross has painted many original comic books. He has also appropriated iconic poses, panels and cover designs of Captain America, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, among others, by artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

When he does, Ross signs his name at the bottom, along with “after XXXX,” supplying the name of the original artist.

In other words, crediting his sources. Something Lichtenstein should have done, as well.

This article originally appeared in The Alliance Review

No cursing over cursive, but stop it anyway

Ohio’s lawmakers have solved all the state’s woes.

They have banished poverty, eradicated hunger and annihilated unemployment. They have fixed our aging infrastructure and devised a plan to keep major manufacturers from stampeding for the borders.

We know they have accomplished all this because they are now focusing their considerable gifts on much smaller worries.

How small? Well, last week the Ohio Senate passed a bill requiring the State Department of Education to develop a curriculum by year’s end to teach cursive writing to elementary kids.

This follows the Ohio House’s passage of the bill in June. The legislation was sponsored by two Republican lawmakers who cite studies that say proficiency in cursive handwriting leads to better literacy and thinking skills, according to a story from NBC-4 in Columbus.

Fortunately, the law does not mandate that schools actually teach cursive, only that the curriculum is available if they elect to do so.

And I hope schools exercise their right not to.

I can hear traditionalists’ moans of anguish. Cursive is a necessity, they will argue.

Here are some other “necessities” that are no longer taught in schools:

Driving a horse and buggy

Telling time with a sundial

Using a washboard

Shoveling coal into a home furnace

Emptying night slops from a chamber pot

The truth — and it’s not even a sad truth, but merely a reflection of the rapidly changing world we live in — is that people just don’t write by hand very much anymore. And when they do, printing suffices.

But how will students communicate with one another? How will they sign checks? My response: Email/texting and direct deposit.

I’m not arguing that students should not be taught cursive at all, just that it needs to take a backseat, and a far backseat at that, to other lessons.

By all means, teach kids how to write their names in cursive so that they can, on those few occasions when they must (like buying a car or house), sign their names. Offer after-school instruction or summer enrichment for children who are really interested in penmanship, perhaps alongside calligraphy.

But the traditional instruction in loops and whorls? The long, laborious exercises where teachers circle stray marks that have gone a millimeter past the dotted line or extend a whisper too far into the margin? The formal cursive versions of the capital G, Q and Z, which nobody outside of school marms has ever written correctly?

Fuhgettaboutit.

If lawmakers are so worried about students’ literacy skills, they should mandate that reading instruction includes ample time for free reading, not just practice for high-stakes tests. If they are concerned about fine motor skills, offer kids more opportunities to learn how to draw, paint and build.

Cursive writing is more about conformity than creativity and critical thinking. Moreover, it’s a skill with little application to the daily lives of most kids.

Educators should give it — you’ll pardon the expression — no more than a cursory nod.

Originally published in December 2018 in The Alliance Review

Revisiting an old friend in the Little House books

Prevailing wisdom among people who study pre-teen reading habits is that girls will read books about boys, but boys are less likely to read books about girls.

Maybe this is changing because of the success of “The Hunger Games,” with a strong female lead whose exploits in three bestselling books are a hit with not only the YA crowd, but adults as well.

I’ve always been an exception to the boys-not-reading-about-girls rule, myself. One of my earliest literary adventures was “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” with spunky Dorothy traveling down “the road of yellow brick,” encountering eccentric companions and showing off her silver slippers to good effect. (Her route became “the yellow brick road” and her footwear turned ruby only in the MGM movie.) I’ve read the book more than a dozen times, and Judy Garland was one of my first big-screen crushes, even if she was too old to play Dorothy.

Recently, I had a chance to revisit another childhood favorite with a female protagonist: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books, newly reprinted in two handsome hardbacks by the Library of America.

These books hold a special place in my heart. When I was a new student at Washington Elementary School in 1976, my second-grade teacher, Melva Jean Watson, read aloud from “Little House on the Prairie” almost every day. Something about the Ingalls family leaving Wisconsin and heading West in a covered wagon struck a chord with me, even if my own migration from Middlebranch to Washington Township in the backseat of a car wasn’t much by comparison.

I am still impressed by the family’s moxy. Laura’s father, referred to mostly as Pa, decides the woods of Wisconsin — immortalized in the first book of the series, “Little House in the Big Woods” — are becoming too crowded. “Quite often Laura heard the ringing thud of an ax which was not Pa’s ax, or the echo of a shot that did not come from his gun,” writes Wilder, who refers to herself in the third person. “The path that went by the little house had become a road.”

Those all sound like good reasons to stay in Wisconsin, not leave it, but nobody has ever accused me of having an overabundance of pioneer spirit.

In the books, little Laura and her sisters often take a backseat to the story of their parents, and Laura’s main occupation is to observe the ways of pioneer families. Not surprisingly for people who lived for — and by — the harvest, the books are filled with food, much more than I remember from age 8. (Maybe Mrs. Watson omitted some parts.)

The Ingalls’ attic in Wisconsin is a veritable produce stand: “The large, round, colored pumpkins made beautiful chairs and tables. The red peppers and the onions dangled overhead. The hams and the venison hung in their paper wrappings, and all the bunches of dried herbs, the spicy herbs for cooking and the bitter herbs for medicine, gave the place a dusty-spicy smell.”

In “Farmer Boy,” which tells the boyhood story of Ingall’s husband, Almanzo Wilder, in New York, mealtime is almost sensuous. “Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy. He ate the ham. He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp golden crust. He demolished a tall heap of pale mashed turnips, and a hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. Then he sighed …”

All that’s missing is a cigarette afterward.

Nearly every page of the “Little House” books are filled with industrious people planting, nurturing, harvesting, storing, slaughtering and building for winter. It’s impressive, especially to a reader whose winter preparations involve nothing more than covering the air-conditioning unit with a tarp and buying a new ice scraper for the car.

Wilder’s characters have fun too, going to the occasional dance and inviting extended family to visit at the holidays, but mostly they work.

One of my favorite sequences in the books, however, has nothing to do with harvests or dances. Later in “Farmer Boy,” Almanzo’s teacher drives a group of disruptive students out of his classroom using an ox-whip. Taking the biblical injunction to spare the rod and spoil the child almost literally, the teacher thrashes the students, jerking them off their feet, tearing their clothes and bloodying their bodies.

Maybe it was my imagination, but I always thought Mrs. Watson read that section with even more vim and vigor than the other chapters.

It’s always nice to revisit old friends, and even nicer to find out that they are more companionable than you remember. So it is with the Little House books. While these new editions omit the classic illustrations by Garth Williams, they are hardly missed. Laura Ingalls Wilder still holds me in thrall with stories of pioneer pluck and an almost-vanished lifestyle that appeal to either gender and all ages.

Originally published in April 2013 in The Alliance Review

Are you highly satisfied with this blog?

Everybody wants my opinion, and everybody wants me to be “very” or “highly” satisfied.

Just the other morning, a nice woman named Shirley (not her real name) handed me a sticker in the drive-thru line of Dunkin’ Donuts. It said she’d love to know if she had “made my day.”

That’s a tough question to answer. Could the wave of good feelings created by a large hot tea and toasted blueberry bagel be enough to carry me through the troughs of the next twelve hours? Later that night, from the vantage point of a comfortable chair, slippers on my feet and warm pipe smoke encircling my head, would I look back over the business of the day and recognize that a 23-second transaction had changed my destiny?

In a word, no.

Yet these silly surveys persist in almost every line of business. If it’s not a clerk thrusting a receipt in my face with a 1-800 number circled at the bottom, it’s an email after the sale, asking me to rank, with “1” being the lowest and “10” the highest, how satisfied I was with my transaction, whether it was for a $20,000 car or a $2 loaf of bread.

And with every inquiry, there is unspoken pressure: “We want you to be very satisfied” or “Is there anything standing in the way of your being highly satisfied today?”

The answer to that last question is yes, many things are standing in the way of my highest satisfaction.

For one thing, I’m eating on the run at a fast-food joint, standing in line behind some pajama-pant-wearing mother of fourteen whose kids all have what looks like ebola running out their noses. Nobody knows what to order, despite having held up the line for what feels like hours. One of them is consistently stepping on my foot, and another is digging orangish wax out of his ear with a plastic spoon he found on the floor, effectively killing any appetite I may still have.

Or I’m in the drive-thru lane behind a diesel truck whose driver believes that everybody wants to hear the beer-drenched musical epic blaring out his speakers, even overtop the revving of his engine. He’s ordering enough food to feed a small army and flirting with the voice on the loudspeaker, calling him/her/it “honey” and “babycakes,” unaware that he’s caused a six-car nuclear meltdown behind him.

So, no, I’m not highly satisfied, very satisfied, or even just plain old satisfied.

And what if I were, indeed, only satisfied? On many surveys, “satisfied” translates to a 7 out of 10, a perfectly acceptable score. But I’m always pressured into being “very” satisfied, usually by employees with large, limpid eyes and wheedling voices whose very existences seem tied to the score that I, a complete stranger, will assign them through an automated phone call.

To me, “very” satisfied means you’ve followed me home, waxed my car, shampooed my carpets, and fed me grapes on the couch while fanning me with palm leaves. Throwing my change at me and stuffing my greasy burger into a sack is not enough to merit the modifier “very.”

Worse yet are the surveys that ask me to describe my satisfaction in words. How the hell am I supposed to do that? “The way Agnes drizzled guacamole on my cheesy potato burrito was nothing short of sublime?” “The replacement windshield, needed because some punk kid didn’t know how to catch a baseball, was artfully installed by Sidney, illuminating the interior of my car just as surely as Michelangelo’s paintings illuminate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?” Gimme a break.

Sometimes, companies entice you to take surveys with the promise of a prize. “Just take our brief survey and you could win an iPad Mini!” and “Call this number for a chance to win $500!” are pretty common come-ons.

Of course, you have a better chance of being plucked out of your bed by aliens from Uranus than you do of winning any prize. And as soon as you indicate that you are anything other than very satisfied, your entry goes directly to the bottom circle of Dante’s Sweepstakes Hell. As a consolation, now that the company has your phone number or email address, they can sell it to other companies, who will in turn attempt to get you to buy their junk and rate their associates.

All of which is why, Shirley, I’m not going to log on to any website and rate our transaction. I smiled at you when I pulled up to the window — you might have thought I looked constipated, but trust me, it was a grin — and thanked you for your efforts. That’s the extent of our relationship. Let it be enough.

This column was originally published in 2014. I don't know if Shirley still works at the local Dunkin' Donuts.

Supreme Court rules against commonsense mandate

It’s a shame the Supreme Court blocked President Biden's vaccine mandate for companies with more than 100 employees.

The mandate gave the Occupational Safety and Health Administration authority to require vaccines for some 84 million American workers. It would have made the nation healthier and saved lives. Additionally, it would have provided a cover story for employees who fell under its auspices: They could have received the vaccine and still maintained their street-cred as conservatives.

Because after the obligatory griping about government overreach, tracking chips and other unfounded foolishness, most workers would have rolled up their sleeves and taken the jab.

Americans saw evidence of this last year when United Airlines required employees to get vaccinated. Despite complaints by a vocal minority, 96 percent of the airline’s employees were vaccinated by the fall.

Significantly, as of Jan. 11, United reported it had gone eight weeks without a single employee death from COVID. While 3,000 of the airline’s workers tested positive for COVID last week, none had been hospitalized.

This is a strong indication the vaccines are protecting people from the most adverse effects of the virus.

I wonder how many United employees and their families were secretly relieved when the company required the vaccine. The decision saved them from publicly backtracking, something many people are reluctant to do, and still offered them protection. It reminds me of a colleague’s teenage son. He was willing to receive the vaccine but begged his parents not to tell anybody. He didn’t want to be identified as a liberal.

Under the now-blocked Biden mandate, workers who refuse the vaccine would have to wear a mask — something both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated should be doing in public during times of high transmission, anyway — and get tested regularly.

Most of the holdouts would have been driven to the needle by the sheer inconvenience of these alternatives. Again, a win for short- and long-term health.

At least the court upheld Biden’s mandate for healthcare workers. When working with vulnerable populations in hospitals, nursing homes and clinics, workers should be vaccinated.

Individual companies can still mandate vaccines, of course, but few will without federal support. Starbucks, for example, scrapped its vaccine requirement after the high court’s decision.

Balancing personal freedoms with public welfare is a tricky business. Many medical professionals and average Americans disagree with the ruling, on these grounds: If COVID weren’t contagious, if it weren’t contributing to significant strain on our hospital systems and making it harder for people to get treatment for other conditions, then workers could decide if they should get the vaccine. When only your health is affected, you can make whatever decisions are best for you.

But the virus is contagious and does affect all Americans. The Supreme Court ruled to hobble a response to help end this health crisis sooner.

The mandate would have made workplaces safer, which is OSHA’s main purpose. As a byproduct, it would have made customers safer too, ensuring more of them would be around to keep the economy humming, which is a major conservative tenet.

It’s ironic, then, that the court’s conservative majority is what stood in the mandate’s way.

Tipping the valet

I blame it on seeing “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” at an impressionable age.

The scene where two parking-garage attendants sail Bueller’s cherry-red Ferrari GT California up and over railroad tracks, punctuated by the “Star Wars” theme thundering in the background, left an indelible mark. I have never trusted parking attendants since, and I am especially irritable at the thought of tipping them.

Tipping, in general, is a custom I don’t understand. I understand that gratuities in a restaurant bridge the gap between what the business pays a server and a living wage. I don’t blame the server, nor do I necessarily blame the restaurant, but I do blame the restaurant industry as a whole for a system that entices customers with low-priced specials and then shakes them down on the check.

But I have options when it comes to eating. I can choose to dine at a fast-food restaurant where tipping is not expected, or I can elect to stay home and prepare my own food. Nobody holds a T-bone to my head and forces me into a restaurant.

I could also choose not to leave a tip, but that way is fraught with peril, including the prospect of wearing a glass of water on my next visit or eating, unbeknownst to me, a thin thread of saliva garnishing the butter on my baked potato. So I always tip.

However, I don’t have many choices when it comes to parking, especially at hotels in big cities, where the only feasible option is often the hotel’s own facility, monitored by bow-tie wearing employees who hover around the entrance like fashionably dressed hobos, sucking cigarettes and waiting for the next easy mark.

My wife knows the drill, because I repeat it every time we travel. We pull to the curb and the penguins start to flock. I whisper to my wife, “Don’t let them help us with the luggage. I can get it myself. Remember, no luggage.”

By then the attendants have opened the doors and pasted on their best come-on smiles. But soon they notice I’ve turned off the car and put the key safely in my pocket, and the smiles falter just a bit. One of THOSE, they’re thinking.

I inquire about available public parking, even though I already know the answer, found on Page 57 of “Parking Attendant Careers for Dummies”: “Tell the mark that the nearest public parking is at least eight blocks away, that it charges exorbitant prices and is only open from 9 to 5 daily with no in-and-out privileges. Say that the public parking lot floods three times a week and that cars are routinely washed away. Mention that last month alone, 37 cars there were broken into, glove boxes pillaged, and gas tanks filled with sugar.”

Truthfully, most of my tipping angst with hotel valets comes from a lack of knowledge. I don’t know if I’m supposed to tip when the valet drives off in the car or when I ask him to retrieve it for me. I don’t know how much is appropriate. And I especially don’t know why I should be obligated to reach for my wallet when my arm is already being twisted.

Miss Manners, that usually reliable arbiter of taste and refinement, is no help. She says to tip a buck for valet restaurant parking but that no tip is necessary at a commercial parking garage “if you were planning to have bodywork done on your car anyway,” which I guess is a joke, but who can really tell?

Because of all this pressure, any interaction between a valet and me is tense. In my mind, the cityscape with its honking cars and hissing bus brakes melts away, and I’m standing in the middle of an Old West town, all tumbleweeds and swinging saloon doors, squinting into the sun on a cloudless day. I’m wrapped in a serape. The valet is dressed the same. Somewhere, somebody plays the theme to “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” as my hand hovers over my holster, which contains not a gun but a wallet. If I draw, I lose.

My opponent and I lock eyes. In his steely gaze I see society’s expectations — tip! tip! tip! In mine, he sees the mantra of the tightwad — no! no! no! My hand shakes, I falter. I look away, my embarrassment and shame almost getting the better of me, but then my true nature, the part of me that hates having this service thrust upon me, unwanted, unasked for, asserts itself.

I sigh and hand over my keys to my vintage 2002 Dodge Neon — it’s so choice, as Ferris might say — but I insist on taking my own luggage. It’s a matter of pride, mostly, but also a way for me to feel less like a bum when I stiff him.

Because a valet can coerce his way into my car, but he will never pry open my wallet.

This column was originally written and published in July 2012. I'm much more generous today, although I still struggle with tipping the valet. 

Getting up the gumption to paint

In the name of domestic tranquility, many household tasks at Casa Schillig are left to professionals.

This includes anything that involves measuring, pasting or power tools. My definition of power tools is generous enough to encompass hammers and screwdrivers, so I consequently do very little that qualifies as “handy.” Sure, I’ll slap together “some assembly required” lawn chairs, but my work is so shoddy I don’t trust anybody except my mother-in-law to sit in them.

A few years into the marriage, my wife and I decided it would be better to hire out these jobs than endure the petty arguing that comes from doing them together. I would rather work a second (and even a third) job to pay a professional than subject myself to spousal browbeating for seven hours on a Saturday or accidentally glue shut my mouth — or hers — with wallpaper paste.

Still, every year I pick one task that I can accomplish on my own, just so I can feel manly and join in water-cooler conversations with burly co-workers who routinely knock out walls, thread electrical wire through ceilings, and bench press the foundations of their homes with a cold brew in one hand and the TV remote in the other. (Said bench pressing being accomplished with their teeth, apparently.)

This year’s project was painting the basement floor.

Actually, it was last year’s project too, but I successfully avoided it with no ill effects to my masculinity. My excuse was provided by one of those Hungry-Jack-dinner-eating contractor types who waterproofed our basement in 2009. He told me not to paint the floor until the newly poured concrete had cured, which conjured up images of Ernest Angley slapping some unfortunate upside the head and intoning, “You are healed!” but apparently is something else entirely since Mr. Angley never appeared in my basement. He recommended waiting six months to paint. (The contractor, not the Rev. Angley.)

In my mind, six months really meant a year, which I somehow stretched to almost two years, letting cobwebs build up in the corners while I pretended not to notice.

But last week I could procrastinate no longer, so I broke out the power washer (the only power tool I feel qualified to operate, since it’s really nothing more than a squirt gun made legitimate through a power cord and frequent on-box warnings) and made a big mess in the name of eliminating those cobwebs. Then I bought some paint, rollers and brushes and got to work.

They say the hardest part of painting is the preparation (“they” being the first 100 people in the phonebook), but I bet they’re not referring to mental preparation. Regardless, I wasted a lot of time pacing the basement, sighing and bemoaning my fate. One day, I even ran off to the movies, so I suppose it’s poetic justice or karma that I saw the pretty-rotten “Cowboys and Aliens.” It wouldn’t have been fair to see something good.

When I finally popped the top off the first paint can, I was surprised by how quickly the job went. I strategized successfully, relocating the cats’ litter box and food bowls to the top of the stairs (painting upsets delicate feline ecosystems), moving everything else to the center of the basement and painting the corners. The next day, I moved everything back, minus the litter box, before painting the center of the room.

The hardest part — well, after working up the gumption to start, that is — was painting my way up the steps, which involved a backward spider crawl that would be the envy of any professional contortionist. At one point, I forgot that I had already painted the handrail and used it to steady myself after all the blood rushing to my head (which at many points was lower than the rest of my body) made me dizzy. This gave me a battleship-gray palm but saved me from a potentially life-ending tumble.

I’d like to believe I didn’t kill too many brain cells by breathing in paint fumes for the last few days, and that the job really does look decent. Not professionally decent, mind you, but decent by my own inept standards, which means there isn’t too much paint on the walls and ceiling and that the places I missed are covered up by strategically placed boxes of Christmas decorations.

And even if it’s not, it’s just a basement. The only reason my wife allows me to tinker down there is that nobody except the cats will ever see it anyway, and they’re so grateful to have their litter box back in its rightful place that they won’t complain about the results.


Originally published in 2011