Saturday, April 16, 2011
Saturday, September 12, 2009
LIFE COACHING OFFICE / FINE ART & CARTOONS GALLERY ONLINE
FINE ARTS STUDIO / GALLERY. The Philip Clarke Brewer Studio / Gallery (Fine Art & Cartoons) is open near Shaw Avenue & FWY 99, Fresno, CA. Gallery Showings By Appointment. (Please Email CounselPro@gmail for appointment & directions--or call: (559) 905-4357.)
PROFESSIONAL SERVICES. P. C. Brewer, M.S., Ph.D., a thirty-year professional psychotherapist, also offers Clinical Art, Music & Writing Therapy to high-functioning Aspergers (PDD) and persons suffering with Social Anxiety, who are not on psychotropic medications and have no chemical dependency or abuse issues. In addition, Four-Hour Marathon-Day Life Coaching is available to contracted Executives, Professionals. Counselors, Clergy, & Businesspersons in a 4-month program. Auxiliary counseling is done via phone and Skype. (Maximum of two enrollees for each 4-month, in-person Executive Coaching Program.) An Apprentice Model Life Coach Training is offered to two (masters level) persons per year.
PROFESSIONAL SERVICES. P. C. Brewer, M.S., Ph.D., a thirty-year professional psychotherapist, also offers Clinical Art, Music & Writing Therapy to high-functioning Aspergers (PDD) and persons suffering with Social Anxiety, who are not on psychotropic medications and have no chemical dependency or abuse issues. In addition, Four-Hour Marathon-Day Life Coaching is available to contracted Executives, Professionals. Counselors, Clergy, & Businesspersons in a 4-month program. Auxiliary counseling is done via phone and Skype. (Maximum of two enrollees for each 4-month, in-person Executive Coaching Program.) An Apprentice Model Life Coach Training is offered to two (masters level) persons per year.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Saturday, March 28, 2009
WELCOME COFFEESHOP FRIENDS..! (Please Scroll Down For Cartoons)
Please scrool down for CARTOONS..! Then go to Older Posts for more cartoons--and examples of Fine Art, my Novels-in-progress. Soon I will be publishing three new websites--to present my CARTOONS (coffeeshopcartoonist.com), my ART, WRITING, MUSIC, & SCREENPLAYS (PhilipClarkeBrewer.com), and my zany GREETING CARDS (NobodysPerfeKt.com)...!
Monday, January 12, 2009
My Cartoon Humor Weight Loss Book: Coming Soon..!
I'm working on a weight loss cartoon book {Laugh It Off © 2009 by P.C. Brewer}. In it I include my bariatrics (weight loss) doctor's advice (below)--upon which I religiously depend--using his ideas also in my weight loss seminars.
Q:
Doctor, I've heard that cardiovascular exercise can prolong life.
Is this true?
A:
Your heart is only good for so many beats, and that's it.
Don't waste them on exercise. Everything wears out eventually.
Speeding up your heart will not make you live longer.
That's like saying you can extend the life of your car by driving it faster.
Want to live longer?
Take a nap.
Q:
Should I cut down on meat and eat more fruits and vegetables?
A:
You must grasp logistical efficiencies. What does a cow eat?
Hay and corn.
And what are these? Vegetables.
So a steak is nothing more than an efficient mechanism of
delivering vegetables to your system.
Need grain? Eat chicken.
Beef is also a good source of field grass (green leafy vegetable).
And a pork chop can give you 100% of your recommended
daily allowance of vegetable products.
Q:
Should I reduce my alcohol intake?
A:
No, not at all. Wine is made
from fruit. Brandy is distilled wine.
That means they take the water out of
the fruity bit so you get even more
of the goodness that way.
Beer is also made out of grain.
So have a cup now and then!
Q:
How can I calculate my body/fat ratio?
A:
Well--if you have a body and you have fat--your ratio is one to one.
If you have two bodies, your ratio is two to one, etc.
Q:
What are some of the advantages of participating in a regular exercise program?
A:
Can't think of a single one, sorry. My philosophy is: No Pain...Good..!
Q:
Aren't fried foods bad for you?
A:
YOU'RE NOT LISTENING!!! .....
Foods are fried these days in vegetable oil. In fact, they're permeated in it.
How could getting more vegetables be bad for you?
Q:
Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle?
A:
Definitely not! When you exercise a muscle, it gets bigger.
You should only be doing sit-ups if you want a bigger stomach.
Q:
Is chocolate bad for me?
A:
Are you crazy..? HEL..LO.... Cocoa beans?
Another vegetable!!! Best feel-good food around!
Q:
Is swimming good for your figure?
A:
If swimming is good for your figure--explain whales to me...
Q:
Is getting in-shape important for my lifestyle?
A:
Hey! 'Round' is a shape..!
Well, I hope this has cleared up any misconceptions you may have had about food and diets. And remember:
'Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways--Chardonnay in one hand--chocolate in the other--body thoroughly used up--totally worn out and screaming 'WOO-HOO, What a Ride'... AND.....
For those of you who watch what you eat, here's the final word on nutrition and health. It's a relief to know the truth after all those conflicting nutritional studies....
1. The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
2. The Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
3. The Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
4. The Italians drink a lot of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
5. The Germans drink a lot of beers and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer
fewer heart attacks than Americans.
CONCLUSION
Eat and drink what you like.
Speaking English is apparently what kills you.
Q:
Doctor, I've heard that cardiovascular exercise can prolong life.
Is this true?
A:
Your heart is only good for so many beats, and that's it.
Don't waste them on exercise. Everything wears out eventually.
Speeding up your heart will not make you live longer.
That's like saying you can extend the life of your car by driving it faster.
Want to live longer?
Take a nap.
Q:
Should I cut down on meat and eat more fruits and vegetables?
A:
You must grasp logistical efficiencies. What does a cow eat?
Hay and corn.
And what are these? Vegetables.
So a steak is nothing more than an efficient mechanism of
delivering vegetables to your system.
Need grain? Eat chicken.
Beef is also a good source of field grass (green leafy vegetable).
And a pork chop can give you 100% of your recommended
daily allowance of vegetable products.
Q:
Should I reduce my alcohol intake?
A:
No, not at all. Wine is made
from fruit. Brandy is distilled wine.
That means they take the water out of
the fruity bit so you get even more
of the goodness that way.
Beer is also made out of grain.
So have a cup now and then!
Q:
How can I calculate my body/fat ratio?
A:
Well--if you have a body and you have fat--your ratio is one to one.
If you have two bodies, your ratio is two to one, etc.
Q:
What are some of the advantages of participating in a regular exercise program?
A:
Can't think of a single one, sorry. My philosophy is: No Pain...Good..!
Q:
Aren't fried foods bad for you?
A:
YOU'RE NOT LISTENING!!! .....
Foods are fried these days in vegetable oil. In fact, they're permeated in it.
How could getting more vegetables be bad for you?
Q:
Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle?
A:
Definitely not! When you exercise a muscle, it gets bigger.
You should only be doing sit-ups if you want a bigger stomach.
Q:
Is chocolate bad for me?
A:
Are you crazy..? HEL..LO.... Cocoa beans?
Another vegetable!!! Best feel-good food around!
Q:
Is swimming good for your figure?
A:
If swimming is good for your figure--explain whales to me...
Q:
Is getting in-shape important for my lifestyle?
A:
Hey! 'Round' is a shape..!
Well, I hope this has cleared up any misconceptions you may have had about food and diets. And remember:
'Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways--Chardonnay in one hand--chocolate in the other--body thoroughly used up--totally worn out and screaming 'WOO-HOO, What a Ride'... AND.....
For those of you who watch what you eat, here's the final word on nutrition and health. It's a relief to know the truth after all those conflicting nutritional studies....
1. The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
2. The Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
3. The Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
4. The Italians drink a lot of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
5. The Germans drink a lot of beers and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer
fewer heart attacks than Americans.
CONCLUSION
Eat and drink what you like.
Speaking English is apparently what kills you.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Cartoons For Grown-Ups
Cartoons for Grown-Ups
By DAVID KAMP
Published: October 17, 2008
At this point, there’s an entire generation of parents and kids who know Jules Feiffer solely as a children’s book author, the man behind the charming bedtime standbys “Bark, George” and “By the Side of the Road.” It’s been eight years since he stopped doing his weekly syndicated comic strip for grown-ups, which was simply called “Feiffer,” and 37 years since Mike Nichols filmed Feif fer’s screenplay “Carnal Knowledge,” an acutely adult-oriented examination of sexual desire, virginity loss, infidelity, divorce and other subjects that never come up in “Bark, George.” So the new anthology “Explainers,” which gathers all of Feiffer’s Village Voice strips from 1956 to 1966, is a welcome reintroduction — or introduction, for the uninitiated — to a great cartoonist who boldly bent his medium to adult purposes long before it was commonplace to do so. As squat and dense as a loaf of spelt bread, this book reproduces the first decade of “Feiffer” in its entirety, and therefore captures in minute detail the birth and development of a whole new approach to cartooning.
EXPLAINERS
Written and illustrated by Jules Feiffer
546 pp. Fantagraphics Books. $28.99
Multimedia
Certainly the young Garry Trudeau and Berkeley Breathed were paying attention. The strips collected in “Explainers” anticipate “Doonesbury” in their unapologetic text-heaviness and political content, and “Bloom County” in the characters’ frazzled, pixilated facial expressions and the cartoonist’s agitated, slightly forward-pitched lettering. (Lettering is the most underrated of cartoonist’s skills; Feiffer is an ace.) You also detect portents of Art Spiegelman, Mark Alan Stamaty and the entire graphic-novel genre. It’s no exaggeration to say that Feif fer opened up the full range of possibilities of what a comic strip could be.
Yet in 1956, Feiffer was a 27-year-old who couldn’t get arrested in the business. This was attributable as much to his own obstinacy as to any prevailing trends. He didn’t have it in him to be a family-friendly gag man like Hank “Dennis the Menace” Ketcham or a concocter of super hero adventures for DC Comics. The New Yorker’s wry panel cartoons were a closer match to Feiffer’s ethos, but still too pat and limiting. Feiffer aspired to nothing less than book-length narratives, satirical and topical, and for this ambition, he was rewarded with a pile of rejection letters.
In his introduction to “Explainers,” Gary Groth, the book’s editor and one of its publishers, elicits a revealing comment from Feiffer about his plight at that time. “It was a Catch-22 situation,” the cartoonist says. “I had no name, so who was going to buy this work that looked like children’s drawings, but was very adult material? Now, if my name were Steig, it would be marketable. If my name were Steinberg, then they could sell it. If my name were Thurber, no problem. So I had to figure out a way of becoming Steig, Steinberg or Thurber in order to get what I wanted into print. I thought of all sorts of things. I could kill somebody, and then get famous that way, and then I could get published. I could commit suicide” — but “suicide was not yet established as a form of self-promotion.”
It’s telling that Feiffer would single out William Steig, Saul Steinberg and James Thurber, then the most idiosyncratic of New Yorker cartoonists — the ones least likely to offer up flip cocktail-party vignettes or tidy, “correct” drawings. Feif fer wanted to be a mold-breaker like those three, but in the idiom of the multi paneled strip. And this strip, were it to exist — well, it wouldn’t be ha-ha funny but mordantly funny, reflecting the humor and outlook of the kind of guy who jokes about committing murder or suicide for pub licity purposes.
Fortuitously, just as Feiffer had run out of publishers to reject him, The Village Voice was founded, in 1955, to capture the new breeze a-blowin’ in beatnik-era Greenwich Village. It was the sympathetic alternative publication that Feiffer had been looking for. He toted his rejected manuscripts to its offices, sat there as its editors avidly pored over his work and left the premises as The Voice’s cartoonist.
His strip, usually six to eight borderless panels, initially appeared under the title “Sick Sick Sick,” with the subtitle “A Guide to Non-Confident Living.” As the Lenny Bruce-ish language suggests, the earliest strips are very much of their time, the postwar Age of Anxiety in the big city; you can practically smell the espresso, the unfiltered ciggies, the lanolin whiff of woolly jumpers. In Feiffer’s sixth-ever strip, an advertising executive is rallying his creative team to make nuclear fallout sexy, proposing “a TV spec called ‘I Fell for Fallout’ ” and “a ‘Mr. and Mrs. Mutation’ contest — designed to change the concept of beauty in the American mind.” The week after that, a macho poet type confides his most shameful secret to his coffeehouse girlfriend: “I’ve never been to Europe.” And the week after that, Feif fer literally puts Oedipus on a psycho analyst’s couch: a hipster in a toga and Ray Charles shades, confessing: “All right. . . . So I marry her. But did I know she was my mother? It’s not like I was sick or something.”
The material may show some age, but from the get-go Feiffer’s visual style was assured and bracingly modern: his figures eloquently but sparely drawn (with a thin wooden dowel dipped in ink, not a pen), and no background illustration, just white space. While the strip continued to plumb topical themes as it progressed — Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr. all make appearances in “Explainers” — Feiffer became a nimbler satirist, hitting upon several recurring setups and characters that would transcend their atomic-age origins.
Chief among these characters were Bernard, the archetypal sweet, considerate young man whom women know they should like but aren’t attracted to, and Huey, the vain, callous lout they can’t resist. Bernard and Huey were prototypes of the Art Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson characters in “Carnal Knowledge,” but their adventures in “Feiffer” remain relevant to urban singles life in a way that the blowsy, date-stamped movie doesn’t. In a representative strip from 1960, a comely date tells Bernard, “Sometimes when I’ve hurt you — you get that lost, little-boy look that makes me want to run over and squeeze you.” Two panels later, she adds, “But that doesn’t mean I want your hands on me.”
Of course, representing any Feiffer strip with a quick quotation really doesn’t do it justice. His garrulous, neurotic characters yammer on and on, their logorrhea half the fun (and often taking up more than half the space). A mouse in the clutches of a cat shouts: “Go ahead! Eat me! Play into their hands!” The cat meekly responds, “Can’t we just accept our given roles?” There follows an elaborate back-and-forth about established mores, class systems and man’s paternalism toward animals, which so flummoxes the cat that he loses his appetite and leaves. Whereupon the mouse mutters: “Weakling — wishy-washy. I would have eaten him.” And the kicker: “What can you expect from liberals.”
Feiffer’s basic scheme was to mine the humor of social and political blather — to show, in a funny way, how people talk and talk but never connect. In our current age of blogs, compulsive confessionals and nightly shoutfests on Fox News and MSNBC, it’s no surprise that so many find him prescient.
But paging through “Explainers,” I don’t see cynicism. Given the strips’ vintage, I can’t help thinking of the Simon and Garfunkel song “Sounds of Silence”: “People hearing without listening / People writing songs that voices never share.” As unrelenting a satirist as the young Feiffer was, he had a bit of Paul Simon’s winsome earnestness. His humor was dark but not nihilistic; he held out hope that his characters would straighten themselves out.
Feiffer says as much in the introduction to this book when he explains to Groth why it is he now finds refuge in writing children’s books: “They represent the gentler, sweeter world that, as we grow older, we go about corrupting first chance we get. No, that’s too cynical. Second and third chance we get.”
David Kamp, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, is the author of “The United States of Arugula.”
By DAVID KAMP
Published: October 17, 2008
At this point, there’s an entire generation of parents and kids who know Jules Feiffer solely as a children’s book author, the man behind the charming bedtime standbys “Bark, George” and “By the Side of the Road.” It’s been eight years since he stopped doing his weekly syndicated comic strip for grown-ups, which was simply called “Feiffer,” and 37 years since Mike Nichols filmed Feif fer’s screenplay “Carnal Knowledge,” an acutely adult-oriented examination of sexual desire, virginity loss, infidelity, divorce and other subjects that never come up in “Bark, George.” So the new anthology “Explainers,” which gathers all of Feiffer’s Village Voice strips from 1956 to 1966, is a welcome reintroduction — or introduction, for the uninitiated — to a great cartoonist who boldly bent his medium to adult purposes long before it was commonplace to do so. As squat and dense as a loaf of spelt bread, this book reproduces the first decade of “Feiffer” in its entirety, and therefore captures in minute detail the birth and development of a whole new approach to cartooning.
EXPLAINERS
Written and illustrated by Jules Feiffer
546 pp. Fantagraphics Books. $28.99
Multimedia
Certainly the young Garry Trudeau and Berkeley Breathed were paying attention. The strips collected in “Explainers” anticipate “Doonesbury” in their unapologetic text-heaviness and political content, and “Bloom County” in the characters’ frazzled, pixilated facial expressions and the cartoonist’s agitated, slightly forward-pitched lettering. (Lettering is the most underrated of cartoonist’s skills; Feiffer is an ace.) You also detect portents of Art Spiegelman, Mark Alan Stamaty and the entire graphic-novel genre. It’s no exaggeration to say that Feif fer opened up the full range of possibilities of what a comic strip could be.
Yet in 1956, Feiffer was a 27-year-old who couldn’t get arrested in the business. This was attributable as much to his own obstinacy as to any prevailing trends. He didn’t have it in him to be a family-friendly gag man like Hank “Dennis the Menace” Ketcham or a concocter of super hero adventures for DC Comics. The New Yorker’s wry panel cartoons were a closer match to Feiffer’s ethos, but still too pat and limiting. Feiffer aspired to nothing less than book-length narratives, satirical and topical, and for this ambition, he was rewarded with a pile of rejection letters.
In his introduction to “Explainers,” Gary Groth, the book’s editor and one of its publishers, elicits a revealing comment from Feiffer about his plight at that time. “It was a Catch-22 situation,” the cartoonist says. “I had no name, so who was going to buy this work that looked like children’s drawings, but was very adult material? Now, if my name were Steig, it would be marketable. If my name were Steinberg, then they could sell it. If my name were Thurber, no problem. So I had to figure out a way of becoming Steig, Steinberg or Thurber in order to get what I wanted into print. I thought of all sorts of things. I could kill somebody, and then get famous that way, and then I could get published. I could commit suicide” — but “suicide was not yet established as a form of self-promotion.”
It’s telling that Feiffer would single out William Steig, Saul Steinberg and James Thurber, then the most idiosyncratic of New Yorker cartoonists — the ones least likely to offer up flip cocktail-party vignettes or tidy, “correct” drawings. Feif fer wanted to be a mold-breaker like those three, but in the idiom of the multi paneled strip. And this strip, were it to exist — well, it wouldn’t be ha-ha funny but mordantly funny, reflecting the humor and outlook of the kind of guy who jokes about committing murder or suicide for pub licity purposes.
Fortuitously, just as Feiffer had run out of publishers to reject him, The Village Voice was founded, in 1955, to capture the new breeze a-blowin’ in beatnik-era Greenwich Village. It was the sympathetic alternative publication that Feiffer had been looking for. He toted his rejected manuscripts to its offices, sat there as its editors avidly pored over his work and left the premises as The Voice’s cartoonist.
His strip, usually six to eight borderless panels, initially appeared under the title “Sick Sick Sick,” with the subtitle “A Guide to Non-Confident Living.” As the Lenny Bruce-ish language suggests, the earliest strips are very much of their time, the postwar Age of Anxiety in the big city; you can practically smell the espresso, the unfiltered ciggies, the lanolin whiff of woolly jumpers. In Feiffer’s sixth-ever strip, an advertising executive is rallying his creative team to make nuclear fallout sexy, proposing “a TV spec called ‘I Fell for Fallout’ ” and “a ‘Mr. and Mrs. Mutation’ contest — designed to change the concept of beauty in the American mind.” The week after that, a macho poet type confides his most shameful secret to his coffeehouse girlfriend: “I’ve never been to Europe.” And the week after that, Feif fer literally puts Oedipus on a psycho analyst’s couch: a hipster in a toga and Ray Charles shades, confessing: “All right. . . . So I marry her. But did I know she was my mother? It’s not like I was sick or something.”
The material may show some age, but from the get-go Feiffer’s visual style was assured and bracingly modern: his figures eloquently but sparely drawn (with a thin wooden dowel dipped in ink, not a pen), and no background illustration, just white space. While the strip continued to plumb topical themes as it progressed — Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr. all make appearances in “Explainers” — Feiffer became a nimbler satirist, hitting upon several recurring setups and characters that would transcend their atomic-age origins.
Chief among these characters were Bernard, the archetypal sweet, considerate young man whom women know they should like but aren’t attracted to, and Huey, the vain, callous lout they can’t resist. Bernard and Huey were prototypes of the Art Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson characters in “Carnal Knowledge,” but their adventures in “Feiffer” remain relevant to urban singles life in a way that the blowsy, date-stamped movie doesn’t. In a representative strip from 1960, a comely date tells Bernard, “Sometimes when I’ve hurt you — you get that lost, little-boy look that makes me want to run over and squeeze you.” Two panels later, she adds, “But that doesn’t mean I want your hands on me.”
Of course, representing any Feiffer strip with a quick quotation really doesn’t do it justice. His garrulous, neurotic characters yammer on and on, their logorrhea half the fun (and often taking up more than half the space). A mouse in the clutches of a cat shouts: “Go ahead! Eat me! Play into their hands!” The cat meekly responds, “Can’t we just accept our given roles?” There follows an elaborate back-and-forth about established mores, class systems and man’s paternalism toward animals, which so flummoxes the cat that he loses his appetite and leaves. Whereupon the mouse mutters: “Weakling — wishy-washy. I would have eaten him.” And the kicker: “What can you expect from liberals.”
Feiffer’s basic scheme was to mine the humor of social and political blather — to show, in a funny way, how people talk and talk but never connect. In our current age of blogs, compulsive confessionals and nightly shoutfests on Fox News and MSNBC, it’s no surprise that so many find him prescient.
But paging through “Explainers,” I don’t see cynicism. Given the strips’ vintage, I can’t help thinking of the Simon and Garfunkel song “Sounds of Silence”: “People hearing without listening / People writing songs that voices never share.” As unrelenting a satirist as the young Feiffer was, he had a bit of Paul Simon’s winsome earnestness. His humor was dark but not nihilistic; he held out hope that his characters would straighten themselves out.
Feiffer says as much in the introduction to this book when he explains to Groth why it is he now finds refuge in writing children’s books: “They represent the gentler, sweeter world that, as we grow older, we go about corrupting first chance we get. No, that’s too cynical. Second and third chance we get.”
David Kamp, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, is the author of “The United States of Arugula.”
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