I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: JOHNNY CASH-Christmas with JOHNNY CASH (2003).

I am not really a fan of Johnny Cash, but Sarah really likes him.  But we both found this album to be pretty awful.  Someone on Amazon said “This CD was mostly the “droning” Johnny Cash, rather than the compelling Johnny Cash.”  And I have to agree.

The music is pretty spare, almost nonexistent.  And Johnny barely sings at all–it’s either sing-speaking or just narrating.  You will not feel uplifted by this disc in any way.

I will say that the story songs “The Christmas Guest” and “Christmas as I Knew It” are quite moving–but nothing you’d want to hear more than once a season.

The fact that he made so many Christmas discs makes me laugh as well because I can’t help but hear

I love thee, Lord Jesus; look down from the sky
But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day
The Christmas Guest
Hark The Herald Angels Sing
The Gifts They Gave
Blue Christmas
Merry Christmas Mary (this song is not meant for Catholics, as Catholics do not forget Mary at all).
O Come All Ye Faithful
Away In A Manger
The Christmas Spirit
Joy To The World
Silent Night
Christmas As I Knew It

[READ: July 21, 2017] Pasmados/Spellbound

Max is an illustrator from Spain (his full name is Max Bardin).

This book collects a number of his prints and places them next to texts from A Map of Astonishment, an unpublished work by Oliver Veek.

It doesn’t really explain that the two items weren’t designed together, so it was a little hard to see how all of the items connected.  The drawings are cool, for sure, and sometimes you can see a connection, but not always.  I also wasn’t sure if the book was sequential in any way (it’s not).

Max has a great cartoon style–big thick lines and oversized/undersized character traits.  The first panel is of a giant, staring goggle eyed at a small skull.  The caption “So it was me who was the weirdo?” doesn’t exactly work, but you could see it connecting–and certainly setting the tone.

The next panel shows the giant (who is a cyclops. it turns out) staring at something else small: “he chewed enthusiastically, with a feeling of disgust.  It had a devil of a taste.”  These drawings are from his book Monologo y alucination del Gigante Blanco.

But the next panel, similar in style, shows a skeletal man and that’s when it becomes clearer that these works are not connected exactly.  This comes from un perro en el grabado de Buero titulado El caballero la muerte y el dianlo.

Although interestingly, the next page with the same skeleton shows blue creatures floating around him and the text says “A swarm of blue dogs buzzed around him, as if wishing to show him where he ought to look.”

Max’s drawing style is very different on the next two page spread–a squarish fellow with big eyes).  The text: it’s not uncommon for certain cases of somnambulism to be accompanied by spectacular forms of levitation” from Max’s book Somnabulists.

Diary shows a man with a big head eating by the water with a scary long red one-eyed monster hovering nearby the text “and if the unthinkable were to happen?”  certainly works here.

This is followed by several magazine covers–all of which showcase Max’s themes and style.  I especially like the one for Deliropolis #41.  The print for the Fumee too Festival is similar with another large black shaded figure with a pointy beak.  The same character appears on the cover of Nobrow #8

Max does a far more realistic drawing for the exhibition Insights into Don Quixote for the Bologna Children’s Book Fair.

Several of the next pictures have a lot more color, culminating in a panel from El Deseo segun Gilles Deleuze which shows a man walking down a dirt road with a bright blue sky ahead of him.

There’s a fun photograph of the Instituto Cervanted de Nadrud in which Max’s character sees the museum with drawings by Max in between the pillars all for the exhibition Panoptical 1973-2012

The reworking of a panel from Vapor (2012) is one of his cleanest and most beautiful pictures of a bird with a red item in its beak soaring through the sky.

There’s a couple of earlier sketches of Mr Bellyfull and Mrs Bag o Bones.

Even though the texts don’t always work the one for the drawing of “sex and symmetry” is great.

Gertrude and I tired on various occasions.  On one of them we managed to reach something like a state of complete total intimacy. However, once there there wasn’t a lot of room for the act itself.

I love his poster for the production of Malasombra which is just a silhouette of a woman and a bad guy but he bad guy is so simply yet menacingly drawn.

His series of strips “The Mirror” is very funny in itself (a man looks in a mirror to mock himself only to not notice death trailing him).  The text: “The basic question of our perception of the universe is put to us crudely each morning n front of the mirror.”

The final page “Heraldry” is a cool picture of almost all of Max’s images a shield, a skeleton, birds and a thorny crown.

See more at www.maxbardin.com  and max0elblog.blogspot.com.es