Karl Gude

Click To Play

If you can convince your fairly shy Indian workshop participants to party down in a conga line, it was a success. On to Spain in the morning where I’ll be meeting up with my family in Madrid (no more blogging for awhile, if I want to stay married) and visiting with the online and print graphics directors of El Mundo and El Pais, two of the best in information graphics, and working to set up a study abroad program for my students. Then on to Pamplona, home of the Malofiej awards, and Bilbao, the Guggenheim.

Hasta luego.

(Music: Asleep at the Wheel)

Click To Play

Hypnotic India traffic

Click To Play

Auto-rickshaw ride

Damn! As I was about to publish this to the web a friggin LIZARD dropped onto my chest from the ceiling and scared the living shaving cream outta me! He has the WHOLE room to drop in on and he chooses the tiny area that I’M occupying. I’ve always heard that geckos had a terrific sense of humor… I thought it was a spider, so I squeeled like a child and nearly destroyed my laptop when I blasted it across the bed with my knees. It wasn’t, thank God, of the arachnid persuasion, but I now have a lizard somewhere in my sheets!

This is what the little bugger looks like (click to enlarge).

I just got to Delhi from Bangalore and I’m staying in one of those wonderful, colonial-era hotels built by the British before the Indians gained independence in 1947. It’s simple and elegant and has a nostalgic, old-world romantic feel, the kind of place you would expect to see Humphrey Bogart strolling through the lobby with Sydney Greenstreet. Oddly enough, in the beautiful, wide-open stairwell that spirals up the hotel’s five floors there is a very large, candid photo of the entire cast of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Burl ives…) all standing on a staircase, but, after a close comparison, not the one I was standing on.

India is a land of many contrasts…

Taj Ambassador hotel

I have two whitewashed rooms. My ceilings are over ten feet tall with fans and the floors are hardwood. The trim, closets and drawers are dark, varnished wood and there are lots of little nooks where lizards can jump out at you for laughs. The colorful tile terrace overlooks palm trees and an old, oval pool. It has air conditioning, too. The heat is oppressive outside.

If you’re interested, here are the graphics we produced in Bangalore in 1 1/2 days. The subject I chose was global warming to tie in with the environmental news of the G8 summit and its strong India/China focus. Some graphics are obviously not finished. Some were thankfully not finished. And some should be finished and published. There are five photos, most of me (they’re for my boys back home!)

It seems that not too many women do information graphics in India. In 2004, I had only one woman out of 32 participants in my India workshops and in my first workshop this time around there weren’t any, although the participants agreed that women were beginning to dominate newsrooms in general all over India as designers, editors and reporters. They speculated that women aren’t into graphics because they’re “not into technology as men are.” I start with a new group tomorrow.

Click To Play

As I was packing to leave for India last Thusday the little bobble-head of 3D illustrator Joe Zeff called to me from on top of the dresser in my son’s room.

“Honey, did you hear that?” I asked my wife?
“What? No.”
Hmmmm.

Why I have Joe’s bobble-head in my house is another story, as is the story of why a Joe Zeff bobble-head exists at all, but when someone sends you something that weird, it’s kind of hard to just throw it away, even years later.

I heard it again…
“I wanna go! Take me with you!”
Damn. More weight. But, I could use a travelling companion…and, him being an amputee and all, I felt for him.

So, as you can see from the video, I introduced him to just EVERYONE. If YOU don’t know Joe, you can see his work, and Ed Gabel’s too (both of them are former Time magazine graphics guys who were a pain in my butt over at Newsweek because they did, on rare occassions, of course, some awesome work), at Joezeff.com.

I could talk about my workshop. It’s going well. I’m being treated well, like royalty, really. I mean, the hotel steward practically took my coat off to press it and my shoes off to them shine while I was WEARING them. GREAT Indian food in this country, too. Honest. Better than in even Lansing, Michigan. Here’s a photo of me working with the group poolside.

(click photo)

I was up until 3 am this morning and did day-one of the workshop on three hour’s sleep. Now it’s almost 1:30 am and I’m STILL up. I WAS asleep, but a guy was banging on a pipe outside of my hotel, the kind of clanging that seeps through expanding foam earplugs and two pillows over your head. So, here I am, looking for stuff to do until he stops. I instant-messaged with my wife for awhile (it was 2:30 pm her time, 11:30 pm mine). Late-night Indian TV is really cool, but kind of wierd with lots of high-pitched singing, group dancing in saris and overacting on EVERY channel. So, after awhile, I put on my iPod to drown out the noise (yes, Neil Young…some bluegrass) and … give a bored guy a Shuffle, a cheap camera, appreciation for Warhol and Photoshop…

(click image)

Click To Play

Give a bored guy a Mac, a camera, a plane, hours to kill and a good quality barf bag and boredom is no longer the issue. Behaving like a child takes center stage.

Long trips like this one –two hours to Atlanta, nine to Paris, ten to Bangalore– are brutal for a guy who’s 6′4″ and can’t sit still. My short, ridiculous movie here which introduces Barfbag Man to the world, and then kills him, is from the Atlanta/Paris leg a couple of hours ago (the guy next to me never said a word). I’m on the Bangalore leg now and all I can think of to do with my time is to share this stuff with you poor souls. (Music: BB King)

This sketch of Jesus riding his Harley is from the Lansing/Atlanta leg.

I know, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Karl, tell me, what’s an atheist like you drawing Christ on a chopper for?” “Well,” I’d answer matter-of-factly, “I love my kid sister and her T–shirt company THAT MUCH, and if she says to put the good Lord on a motorcycle, or on an ice cream truck for that matter, then I’m doing it faster than you can say “crucify that artist.” (my legs are asleep in this chair) Besides, things like this tie in with a long tradition of Americanizing a foreigner who grew up in the Mideast a jillion years ago speaking a foreign language and making him one of our own. Remember those great country song lyrics:

“Drop kick me Jesus
through the goal posts of life
End over end
neither left nor right”

God and football.

Putting ancient people into modern settings is nothing new; it’s good marketing and makes these ancients easier for people to relate to. Rembrandt knew this when he painted “Aristotle Admiring the Bust of Homer.”

As you know, old Aristotle and Homer would fit right in at one of your toga parties, right? But what IS Aristotle wearing in that painting? For the 17th century, those are modern clothes. Buddha in a business suit, anyone?

Wanna see Jesus as a fun guy “truckin” like Mr. Natural? It’s for sale on sis’s website: www.TheMastersGarage.com.

Time to watch a movie.