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“It’s the so-called normal guys who always let you down. Sickos never scare me—at least they’re committed.”
—Catwoman, Batman Returns

I own many books by Chip Kidd – probably too many. It’s not what you might think. He is a writer, but Chip Kidd is foremost a graphic designer, and a savant at book design. Book design? Yeah. Book design is an art—an underappreciated art as a matter of fact.

I remember when I first realized that book design was an art and an art worth appreciating; I sat in Dr. Colpett’s Modern Art class as she lectured on the work of El Lissitzky. El Lissitzky, like my other hero – Alexander Rodchenko, embraced mass production in the fine arts. Both artists embraced media that were modern – the photograph, the photomontage, the propaganda poster, the magazine and the book. It was a lecture I wouldn’t forget.

The first book I bought by Chip Kidd was his Batman: Animated, a book detailing the production behind the Bat-Man’s animated show of the 1990s. I came home that night after buying the book, and showed my fiancée, who was a designer. “Check this out!” I said. She pored over the book. Everything about the book was beautifully thought out  she said– the use of texture, layouts, the variety of source materials, and the gatefolds. All I could say was, “Yeah, I know . . .”

Later I bought Jack Cole and Plastic Man, and the book made my head spin. Rather than cleaning up the source material – much of it dating from the 1940s, Kidd and his co-conspirators subjected the weathered Plastic Man comics to a macro lens and used these instead of attempting to clean up the issues. If you’re not a nerd, you might not understand Kidd’s audacity.

In the world of comic books, the mint copy is the Holy Grail of comic collecting. I say Holy Grail because such copies are forever sought by fools but are never found by said fools. They only exist as an abstraction just as a limit does in calculus. A book may approach mint condition, but it will never reach it. Perhaps somewhere – beyond both time and space – there exists the Platonic forms for all the great comic books: The first issue of Action Comics featuring Superman, The Fantastic Four with the coming of Galactus, or the first issue of Detective Comics featuring the Bat-Man (I refuse to type Batman). The books would be immaculate – no creasing, no smearing of ink, and no browning of pages. But in the place governed by time and space, such books have no place.

Looking at the book, I realized that Kidd rendered my beloved Plastic Man in the manner of a Modernist. The Modernists were obsessed with being true to the materials of the medium—there is no distinction between form and content. The materials of a work of art are on equal footing with form or content of the piece. Kidd revealed the fibers of cheap newsprint and the uneven way ink adhered to it. Sometimes he radically cropped the images, emphasizing Cole’s subtle inking or how the inks were slightly out of registration. And he celebrated every comic collector’s worse nightmare – brown pages. The comic book industry, until recently, used inexpensive newsprint for their ephemera. Cheap newsprint has a high level of acidity, and the paper was burning with acid as it came of the presses. And as Kidd celebrated every flaw of my beloved medium, I achieved satori— I saw the beauty of imperfection.

A few years back, he designed Peanuts: The Art of Charles Schulz, a book that never fails to induce vertigo when I look stare down into its pages. The source materials are so varied, and are shot and arranged so beautifully that you wallow in texture – newsprint fibers, four-color inks, and even the yellowing tape that keeps the strips fixed in the scrapbook; who would think yellowing tape could be so beautiful?

His Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Bat-Man in Japan. The book reads from right to left like a manga should. And the pages of the reproduced manga are sometimes faded or torn or folded. These imperfections and signs of age only add to the beauty of Jiro Kuwata’s bizarre but lavish take on the caped-crusader. Kuwata was a great cartoonist in his own right, creating the famed Japanese character, 8-Man. Hell, I even sprung the extra dough for the hardback, because I wasn’t buying a book, I was buying art.

Chip Kidd is largely responsible for my dislike of slick, white paper and garish colors, which has become the norm in the comics industry today. There are times when I see a slick, pristine books then run screaming to open my tattered copy of The Brave and the Bold, May 1964, issue no. 53— The Flash and the Atom team up against “The Challenge of the Expanding World.” It is a work of great depth and beauty, illustrated by the phenomenal Alex Toth. And opening the comic, I inhale the fumes of acid and as that acrid taste hits my tongue it fuels my four-color adolescent screams . . .

(C)2009 Kent Gutschke

“Life is a not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be experienced.”
van der Leeuw

When you’ve spent enough time with someone – perhaps a friend or a lover, you might – if you’re lucky – develop a closeness that often makes words unnecessary. The experience is quite elusive, but when it happens you will never forget its beauty. After having this experience you might wonder if the same holds true for life—that is, should I live long enough, might I cultivate an unspoken relationship to life that allows me to live both freely and happily?

Now I have studied enough philosophy to know that simple explanations to philosophical questions usually belie the dullness and ignorance of the mind that conceived them. That being said, I’m going to risk being both dull and ignorant in this blog.

It seems that everywhere I look people are desperately trying to be happy. And their desperation lends something absurd and comical (and tragic) to their efforts. I would bother to catalogue most of the efforts if there weren’t so many, but suffice it to say that they are as varied as prayer, prescription drugs, and pilates. And I can’t help but giggle when I weigh our efforts to be happy against our miniscule gains. And it doesn’t take long before the cliché about repeating the same actions and expecting different results pops into mind.

During my thirty-nine brief years on this planet, I’ve been called many unflattering things and the one that hurts the most is when I’ve been called cynical. It hurts because a cynic would look at this situation and pronounce the possibilities for human happiness improbable at best and impossible at worst. But that wouldn’t be my interpretation. No, I stupidly and simply believe that we try too hard.

It’s almost akin expending a great amount of effort in trying to remember something that hovers about the tip of the tongue but eludes both conceptualization and verbalization. The more effort you expend the more difficult remembering becomes. Kind of funny isn’t it? No the best means I’ve found to solve this little problem is not to try all. When I relax the thought simply flows out of me. And it may be that happiness is akin to this experience.

I *think* it was Hawthorne who wrote that happiness is like a butterfly—the more effort you spend in casing it, the greater your frustration in not catching it. It is only after becoming frustrated and sitting quietly that the butterfly comes to you and sits on your shoulder. My God, I’m beginning to sound like all those Alan Watts books I read in my early twenties.

And as silly all that may sound, the history of human experience is rife with corroborating evidence. There is the example of Dostoevsky, who was placed before a firing squad only to have his death sentence commuted to a four-year term in a Russian gulag. In his House of the Dead he chronicles the wretchedness of his condition, but tucked in this catalogue of prison life is the experience of narrator who looks upon the savage and wild Russian steppes and forgets his wretchedness. In his later books he develops this idea, suggesting that one might see with God’s eyes and find the divinity in a sunbeam or a lone leaf at dawn. There was also Christopher Smart – the 18th Century English poet – who despite the abusive conditions within the asylum (he was committed) wrote that he could see God in the everyday actions of his cat, Geoffrey.

Now it would be easy to say that these were all extraordinary people, who all had extraordinary visions of reality. Hell, Kit Smart was deemed insane by the English government and committed, but what Kit Smart claimed to see wasn’t crazy at all. To characterize these visions of reality as extraordinary is assume that they require get feats of effort to attain them or extraordinary states of mind to see them. And when we do that we are back to where we began. These visions may be extraordinary only in the sense that we need to unhinge our minds from the way they commonly operate.

To my mind, Nietzsche is the philosopher that understood all too well how the human mind orients itself to the world. Forget all the nonsense about an id, ego, and superego, and tune into the will to power. The will to power is a succinct concept for understanding why we do not often see with the eyes of God, and we all too often see with eyes that are all too human. I find it amusing that so many religious people become so uncomfortable when they hear Nietzsche’s name. It’s almost like yelling boo to a group of children. I have always thought that if you have a strong mind and your god does not have feet of clay, then you should have no fear of Nietzsche. In fact, you should thank and revere him. He is the voice of one crying in the wilderness. And he was a man who had the courage and integrity to challenge a nihilistic and morally bankrupt culture (that is if you have courage enough to listen).

When you read Nietzsche, you see man described as a coiled spring, a mass of desires that has been reigned in by a slave morality. That vision of man is the one that operates in our everyday lives. It is the vision that places “ME” and “MY” desires front and center and says to hell with the rest of the universe. It is a way of looking at the world that clouds our vision and prevents us from seeing the divine in a sunbeam.

But is a mind that runs not on Windows, not on UNIX, but on the will to power an easy thing to unhinge or change? I can’t honestly say, but I believe it is easier and more fruitful to pursue this avenue than drinking booze, smoking dope, serial dating, primal scream therapy, shrinks, reality t.v., and myspace. And who knows? It may be so easy it’s shocking, provided we have some patience.

If truth be told, we are (most likely) beings of light. No doubt the old professor would roll his eyes at this statement, and I would receive low marks for engaging in transcendental mischief. But Nietzsche was right when he wrote, “Humanity is a polluted stream and an embarrassment.”

After all, we are – in our current state - pitiable things to be overcome.

I originally posted this in August of 2005. Immediately after being posted I received many email from concerned friends. If you haven’t a sense of irony or humor, do yourself a favor and quit reading. Because if I get a concerned letter from you, I’m deleting you (now that would be REALLY funny).

I was thinking today. I was thinking about Schrödinger’s cat. I had some time on my hands, an hour to be precise, so I was watching clouds and thinking.

I was thinking about Schrodinger’s cat and the existence of multiple universes. See there are some cosmologists, who are so troubled by Erwin’s conceptual cat that they formulated the theory of multiverses. These theorists argue that moments are actually bifurcation points. These bifurcation points are moments wherein conscious beings (like you and I) make decisions like “Shall I go to work today or call in sick?” These decisive moments cause the universe to split into multiverses, two or more universes. In one universe, you go to work. In another, you call in sick. In addition, this splitting of reality doesn’t end with this one decision. At each decisive moment, you create multiverses until you die. I was thinking about all this and watching clouds. Suddenly, I realized that this line of thinking troubled me far more than Schrödinger’s little cat.

If the theory of multiverses holds true, then there exists a Kent that marries his college sweetheart, earns his Ph.D., teaches at a decent university, has his finances in order, and lives a relatively happy life. And you know what? I hate that Kent.

After all this thinking, watching clouds, and self-loathing, I arrive at a computer terminal and decide to end it all. Yeah, I decide to commit virtual suicide. I decide to delete my myspace.com account. Delete my blogs. Delete my comments. Delete my friends (feel free to place scare quotes around this one). And the act I relish most is deleting myself. I decide to burn down the house and obliterate it all. And I did.

And when I did, I received a message saying that the staff at myspace.com will email me a confirmation, providing me with instructions and additional steps to complete the process. And I thought to myself, “Have I fallen into a Kafka novel or what?”

Next time, I’ll use my car’s exhaust pipe and a garden hose. At least there’ll be less paperwork. And I’ll finally get the rest I deserve.

Written on July 9th, 2009

Today I sat in an empty office eating pretzels and reading through the final chapters of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. And as always happens when I finish a book, I felt a touch of sadness – this time made deeper by Wells’ melancholy ending. But mixed with this sadness was a sense of accomplishment; I’ve started the book four times, never traveling into the future with the Time Traveler until today. And until these final chapters, I did not think that The Time Machine was as well written or as interesting as eitherThe War of the Worlds or The Island of Doctor Moreau—in fact, in the opinion of this scholar, the first chapter of The War of the Worlds might be the most finely crafted first chapter of any novel written in the English language. So while I flirted with The Time Machine, my first love has always resided with the Martians and the vivisectionists.

This was the case until recently when I finished Paul Davies’ slender but brilliant book, How To Build a Time Machine. Davies inspired me to finish The Time Machine with his placing the publication of the book first in his chronology of time travel.

What is striking about those last melancholy chapters of The Time Machine is the Time Traveler witnessing the last days of our sun. If you haven’t gotten the message, sometime in the Earth’s distant future the sun will exhaust much of its fuel but before ending its life as a white dwarf, it will experience pangs of death as a red giant. And during that time, the sun will swell, and devour the first three planets in our solar system, reducing them to cinders. Wells includes the sun expanding in its death throes to counterpoint the winding down and exhaustion of the human race into the Eloi and the Morlocks. And given this counterpoint, I would argue that the last half of the novella is a mediation on mortality and human vanity in the face of thermodynamic death – the eventual unwinding of the universe into an infinitely cold, dark, and lifeless expanse.

But what is even more striking and remarkable is Wells’ humanity in those last chapters. With good reason, the mention of H. G. Wells conjures images of fantastic machines: the Martian tripod and their equally deadly maser, an elixir having the power to make a man invisible, a spacecraft that antigravitates men to the moon, and a machine of ivory, brass, and crystal that moves through time. His name also suggests science and logic – he was a trained scientist after all – and he even had a primitive vision of the time-space continuum before Einstein published his paper on special relativity in 1905. But even more striking than the thermodynamic death of our sun or the time machine itself was his genius to include two unclassifiable flowers into his plot.

The flowers were a present from a girl – an Eloi – the Time Traveler saves from drowning in the future. As she screamed for help, none of her kinsmen bothered helping her because in the future mankind devolves into a docile, self-absorbed race of cattle. But after saving her life, the Eloi girl and the Time Traveler become friends, and it is the only tender and genuine relationship in this future. At one point, the girl picks flowers and places them in the Time Traveler’s suit pocket. And as the Time Traveler tells the story of the girl’s death and his escape from the Morlocks to his dinner guests, he remembers the flowers and pulls them from his pocket. And while his guests freely admit that the flowers are unclassifiable, they refuse to believe his story; the flowers, however, are more important to the success of The Time Machine than proving the veracity of the Time Traveler’s tale.

When the Time Traveler decides to leave his time once again for the future or the past, he leaves these flowers on his table. And these two humble little flowers stand in stark contrast to the death of our sun and the devolution of the human race. He ends the book with the unnamed narrator meditating on the flowers: “And all I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers – shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle – to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.”

Beneath all the fantastic machinery, the science, and the logic, Wells prized the genuine affection and trust – which is not easily found – among good friends. For myself, it’s a pleasant, – albeit belated – surprise and a fantastic ending for a wonderful novel.

I’m reposting my 2005 blog on A Charlie Brown Christmas. I hope you enjoy it.

Merry Christmas.

Last night, I put on my gym clothes with every intention of working out when ABC aired A Charlie Brown Christmas. As the show began, I finished tying my shoes, and plopped in a chair. I did this knowing that I was pressed for time—I planned a quick work out followed by an appearance at an acquaintance’s birthday party. And I sat in the chair and watched knowing that because I own a copy of A Charlie Brown Christmas on DVD,” I could watch the show at any time. What is funny is that none of these reasons seemed reasonable at the time.

When I was a kid growing up in the 1970s - before the VCR, DVD, and TIVO, I considered it a personal tragedy if that season, I missed A Charlie Brown Christmas. And if recollection serves me, I missed it only once in a span of ten years. Afterwards, I was so distraught that I vowed never to miss it again. During that time, CBS aired the show, preceded by their spiraling, neon banner spelling “SPECIAL PRESENTATION.” This was your cue to remain attentive for the next thirty minutes. Dolly Madison always sponsored the show, and when I recall those ads, I still have a great fondness for them. All this nostalgia was missing from ABC’s presentation, but I remained riveted to my chair nevertheless—and all the while, my cell phone rang in the other room and steadily filled with messages from a frantic girlfriend, pleading, “Kent, where are you?”

I can’t count the times I’ve seen the show, but I never tire of it. Yes, the animation is at times clumsy but charmingly so. The voice actors sometimes speak in unusual cadences when delivering their lines. And the backgrounds are shockingly minimal, especially during close ups. But none of these criticisms matter. All these quirks and ticks give the show a perfection that has eluded every other Charlie Brown cartoon. The perfection of imperfection is after all the essence of Charlie Brown.

As I child I unconditionally loved the show, and as an adult, my appreciation of it deepens every year; I never tire of the intersection between the understated brushes of West Coast jazz and the frosty chill of East Coast skepticism. For me, Charlie Brown’s yearly insecurity is a refreshing check to the gross stupidity and materialism that motivates Cabbage Patch riots and stampeding Wal-Mart shoppers. All Charlie Brown wants for Christmas is to know the true meaning of Christmas, a meaning buried beneath the receipts from Black Friday and Internet Monday.

Theological debates aside, only a cynic would object to peace on earth and goodwill to all men. Sure, the sentiment is naive, but I find it refreshing that at the end of a long year filled with depressing news and all the psychiatric help five cents can buy, for a brief moment I can entertain that most childish of thoughts - simple happiness.

So in the most festive (and commercial) time of year, I ask you, ‘What can Brown do for you?’

Merry Christmas Charlie Brown!