Graham Rawle's new vision of Oz

By the time L. Frank Baum moved to Los Angeles in the early years of the 20th century, he'd already completed "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and had begun publishing its sequels. A longtime fan of the theater, he was one of the earliest authors to embrace the idea of capturing his stories on film; Oz was on screens in 1910, 1914 and 1925 before 1939's "The Wizard of Oz" debuted. But it's the very omnipresence of that film, British artist Graham Rawle notes, that has blotted out Baum's original writings.

I had always considered The Wizard of Oz to be one of the greatest stories ever told, though my opinion was based on countless viewings of the 1939 MGM motion picture. Like so many others, I knew the film inside-out, but had never read the book. What I eventually discovered between its pages was inspiring.

In fact, it inspired Rawle to spend two years creating a new illustrated version, "L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz," out this month. He has restored parts of the book that were omitted from the famous movie version.

I was surprised to find L. Frank Baum's Oz richly populated with bizarre and wonderful characters not featured in the film: the Dainty China people, ornament-sized folk made from porcelain who are prone to breakages, and the Hammer Heads, armies of armless fighters with extendable necks and hard, flat heads. There are extra scenes, as well as back story, that reveal the origin of the Winged Monkeys, how the Tin Woodman came to be made of tin, and how the Emerald City only appears green because its inhabitants are made to wear green tinted spectacles.

Rawle handcrafted miniature sets, costumes and characters from common materials -- Toto was carved from balsa wood, the Emerald City's skyline includes painted, glittered Pringles cans, and a spider's legs were made of stalks of spray-painted asparagus. He then photographed his creations and assembled and tweaked the images in Photoshop. His illustrations are vivid constructs that come alive in the strangest ways, and the behind-the scenes views are equally fascinating -- a couple of them are after the jump.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Can art create order?

Growing up, I was very good at math, which was uncommon for girls. My reading scores were never as good as my math scores, which surged ahead in every test, often off the charts. At home, bored, I would create massive long-division problems to see if the numbers would sift into patterns, then try to figure out why. Later, in 11th grade, I studied calculus. Watching the practical, solid numbers spool out according to complex equations was at first incomprehensible, then one day, it clicked. When I had an elective my senior year, took advanced calc on a lark. For a long time I saw beauty in numbers.

And for me, the arts were something different: They were about being able to move outside of the rules. It started by pouring pea soup into your shoes -- if you could pour soup in your shoes, and elephants could wear suits, then why shouldn't children walk from a wardrobe into another word, one that moved asynchronously with their own? Teenagers could be driven to suicide by unrequited love. Leia could be a heroine for the Rebels, people in a Las Vegas bar could be lizards wading in blood, the Clash could rock the Casbah.

So I was surprised to find PhD student and The Valve contributor Joseph Kugelmass write:

I needed to be supremely rational and brilliant to cope with the challenges ahead, and the way to do that was to create an environment that encouraged the furthest flights of intellect. Rather than getting stuck in the emotional, instinctual thrashings of pop music, I needed to climb up to the Olympian heights of classical purism: Mozart, Bach, some Beethoven, Vivaldi, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Scarlatti, and then other acceptable works by Dvorak et al.

He goes on to talk about how, as he listened to these classical musicians, the works that he found appropriately rational got whittled down -- no "Requiem," no "Rite of Spring." Now he questions the entire project, and -- lacking the knowledge of Alex Ross -- I do too. Is any classical music rational? It has form and structure -- but does that make it rational? Pop music also has form and structure (take any song produced by the Neptunes as an example). Is it really possible for any music, no matter how formally complex, not to be emotional or instinctual?

When I read, I often adore the books that encourage the furthest flights of intellect (to be fair, Kugelmann's quote comes from an extended conversation about his response to the work of David Foster Wallace). I love books by Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo and enjoyed puzzling over John Berger's "From A to X." But I would not say that these writers are devoid of emotion. "Ratner's Star," Delillo's science-iest novel, is full of trepidation, expectation, loss and fear.

Is art a logical place to seek order? What kind of art might create an environment that nurtures our most rational and brilliant selves? In July, "The Eureka Hunt" by Jonah Lehrer in "The New Yorker" investigated research that shows that inspiration comes from our intuitive right brains, suggesting that our "furthest flights of intellect" may be very connected to the "emotional, instinctual."

Or are we at our most brilliant when we are rational? Can fiction or music or painting help get us there?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credit: Jackson Pollock painting "One: Number 31, 1950" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Americasroof via Wikimedia

Frank Warren reveals the secrets behind PostSecret.com

Frank Warren is the founder of PostSecret.com, which has grown from an art project website to a book series; the fourth book, "A Lifetime of Secrets," was published last year. The idea, which Warren told me is embraced quickly by younger people but is somewhat harder for older generations to understand (his dad isn't into it), is that people compose/design a postcard that reveals a closely held secret, then mail it, unsigned, to him at his house in suburban Maryland. Each week, he posts a selection of these confessions on the Web, releasing the secrets into the open. Since he began PostSecret in 2004, Warren has received hundreds of thousands of postcards.

Yesterday Warren visited the L.A. Times and shared some of the stories behind PostSecret with Jacket Copy.

Off-camera, Frank Warren noted that he's been struck by the continued warmth and openness of the people who contribute to PostSecret and come to his speaking events on college campuses, where many stand up and reveal secrets in front of their friends and classmates.

Tonight, Frank Warren speaks at USC. People who attend may be invited to participate in the still-in-the-formulating-stages PostSecret movie. If you'd like to go, be warned, the secret is out — Facebook counts more than 2,500 confirmed attendees.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Running for cover

Q: What does the cover of a book tell you about the book itself?
A: Nothing / Everything.

Can an uninitiated reader know anything more about the contents of James Joyce's Ulysses simply from seeing that iconic, large-lettered cover?  Do J.D. Salinger's white-white paperback editions offer any guidance? The little enigmatic rainbow at the top corner certainly doesn't help.

These kinds of things were on my mind as I visited the opening reception for "Cover Version," a bookishly-themed group show at Culver City's Taylor De Cordoba gallery. The premise was simple: artists had been asked to redesign the covers of their favorite books. The end result was offerings from over twenty New York and Los Angeles based artists that ranged from the literal to the oblique.

Using wood panels, TM Davy provided a literal "translation" of the cover for Jean Genet's "The Thief's Journal," with two pages of text filled in by hand on either side. Scott Hug's "Breakfast of Champions" brought a mirror-ish metallic sheen to Kurt Vonnegut's novel. It also completely fooled me into thinking that someone had just left a real, published edition of Vonnegut's novel out as some sort of tribute. Jacob Feige took JG Ballard's "Vermillion Sands" to a Martian landscape as seen by Mondrian and MF Tichy's video installation of "Notes From Underground" promised (and delivered) every page from Dostoevsky's novel in seven seconds.

Timothy Hull, the New York-based artist who curated the show, said that he keeps several exceptionally designed books "on display" at his apartment and told me that his own book collection included several first editions from Gertrude Stein. " 'Wars I Have Seen,' with that Cecil Beaton photograph, is probably my favorite of hers, cover-wise," he said. "And I love the no-nonsense, academic covers that Routledge puts out. Especially the ones by Jean-Francois Lyotard. They're just so precise and straightforward."

I could tell he meant it, as Hull's contribution to the show was a similarly pared-down version of W.H. Auden's Selected Poems: just the words themselves in bright yellow and red against a sky-blue background.

Lastly, on the subject of book covers, please check out the winners of the 2008 Penguin Design Award and what is surely the most bizarre, naturalistic cover for On the Road that I've ever seen. More Penguin covers through the ages are here.

George Ducker

For Arthur, it's hard out there on the edge

Arthur magazine, left; at right, Loren Coleman with one of the artifacts from the International Cryptozoology Museum.

Arthur magazine is in trouble. The not-quite-6-year-old free magazine has suffered a series of financial challenges, which culminated in editor Jay Babcock buying out his partner about a year ago. (Full disclosure: I've known Jay since we were both DJs at pirate radio station KBLT.)

Arthur is about music and politics, but that doesn't go far enough to describe its edginess. It is about independent music that gets little radio airplay, like alt-folk and contemporary psychedelia, and its politics are of the leftist, peacenik variety. Its columnists include media theorist Douglas Rushkoff and Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore; writers Trinie Dalton and Brian Evenson have contributed. With a penchant for challenging the (political or musical) status quo, it's quite a bit different from the glossy magazines found on newsstands.

This difference may be part of the problem. A magazine that's saying something no others are saying and covering music others don't cover might be hard for advertisers -- upon whom it relies -- to wrap their heads around. It's not unlike the problem faced by Loren Coleman of the International Cryptozoology Museum -- he's doing something that the big guys just don't get.

Unfortunately for Coleman, the "big guys" are at the Internal Revenue Service.

Coleman's predicament after the jump.