The grandparents of the Power Puff Girls

The grandparents of the Power Puff Girls are those big-eyed waif pictures from the 60s and 70s that went so well with Tang, the space-age powdered orange drink choice of astronauts. The prototype were those painted by Margaret Keane, and despite the cutesy factor, the world looked cold for those parentless children.

When I was a kid in the suburbs (age of 10 on) there were houses that always felt cold and looked cold in a way peculiarly suburban. In the past few decades, I’ve lived in ice cold mill houses and other old houses with inadequate heat. But the 70’s suburban chilly was an aesthetic almost of petrified disinterest. Something about the architecture (whether ranch or modern) and the big plate glass windows and a certain minimalism in decoration that bespoke a lack of imagination and epidemic confusion as to what “taste” meant and whether it directed or reflected lifestyle or had anything to do with one’s life at all. And, looking back, I can’t begin to tell you much about the lifestyle as the predominate characteristic was treading time’s water. All the rooms in most all these houses were like aquariums and we the fish floating, passing time until the box top opened at about 6:30 and dinner floated out of dehydrated packets onto the table. Didn’t help that monotony was a popular color for walls, sofas, chairs and curtains. I babysat quite a bit and it was this way at almost all the homes and at the homes of friends.

As far as the literal cold, it was energy crisis time which had something to do with it, I suppose. There was an afghan over the back of every sofa and everyone was turning down the temp.

Babysitting you got real familiar with people’s homes. Almost all were like entering isolation chambers so that after the kids were in bed it was hard to fight to stay awake. At least the houses at which I babysat. A few books. Never even one bookcase full. Some John Updike or Saul Bellow indicated particularly intellectual tastes but it was still bestseller time. Most of the homes had Readers Digest Condensed, if that, which they never read. If the people had hobbies they weren’t evidenced. I babysat for people of several different religious persuasions and the hippyish unitarian-universalist houses sometimes stood out as somewhat apart but I never babysat for those homes. So after the kids went to bed, when there was nothing on television but the Tonight Show, I’d wrap myself up in the afghan on the couch, fight to stay awake, and periodically go through the shelves looking for evidence of something anything different from what had been there the time before.

Ang Lee’s “Ice Storm”, set in 1973, reduplicates the era with such faithfulness that watching the film has always been like stepping back into the middle of it and that’s painful. I’ve not read Rick Moody’s novel upon which the film was based, and some reviewers don’t like Lee’s adaptation, calling it cold, distant, saying he doesn’t go beyond the level of artifact, saying well he couldn’t understand as he is Taiwanese. Which is odd because when I watched the film, I thought, how in the hell did this man who grew up in Taiwan get it all so godawful right? Perhaps partly because if there was any age about particulars it was the 70s with its choice few particulars defining the different teams and serving as life’s stage and life. The popular books, the popular music, the popular clothes. Pop, pop, pop. At least in the isolation of certain suburbs. And if a reviewer criticizes Lee’s camera disengaging from the tenative kiss of an adolescent couple in an empty pool, and says he’s again distancing, going for the sky, unable to go deep, well, what can I say but it fits what I knew about 1973. No one was home.

Just as in the movie, homes didn’t feel much like homes. They felt like empy, dressed up bus stations where a few people occasionally gathered waiting for the next ride out.

Over it all gazed, particularly in the bedrooms of preadolescent girls and in some play or game rooms, these prints of big-eyed waifs. There were the upbeat type in dwarfed modlike clothes or the really really sad Margaret Keane type who looked godawlful cold and somewhat hungover from the 50s and 60s.

I’m trying to pretend we’re not cold here but we’re going to be this year. The landlord came by Friday to take a look at the radiators and cleaned out a bunch of rust. The heat is on a timer. When we moved in we didn’t know it would only be on in the evening between 4 and 11 and that it would then go off and come back on for a brief while in the morning. That’s fine for people who work during the day but H.o.p. and I are here during the day homeschooling and it gets cold. We get by on space heaters.

It has been cold even in the evening though and it’s below freezing at night. I called today and said y’know it really is too cold here. Thus the radiator check. It was a lot warmer last year after the new boiler was put in so I was surprised that it was as cold this year as it was the first year we moved in, which was pretty miserable. Some of the radiators now feel like they give off almost no warmth at all.

The landlord turned on the heat a little earlier than usual to see how warm our apartment would get and after an hour and a half he came in and reached up high in this room and said he could feel some warmth. As they are old ceiling radiators, the little heat our pipes produce goes toward making the upper floors feel a bit toastier.

We bought an oil space heater to help things out.

The barons of energy are making huge profits.

The landlord is still a nice guy whose squeaky wheel noises about the cost of heat are louder than my squeaky wheel noise about it being cold. He said something about absorbing part of the cost of the space heater. Maybe he will.

The landlord said that a new tenant in the building is an evacuee from Katrina.

While I was waiting to see if the cleaning of rust deposits would help our apartment heat up a bit, I’d discovered that the black bit of foam that came with the new vacuum cleaner was essential (ours died) and so H.o.p. and I went out to the trash to look for it, which fortunately would be in the vacuum cleaner box. The landlord was sweeping up the sidewalk. This week they shaved the street all the way down revealing a quite early cobblestone street in parts. Then they came through with a street sweeper and swept all the dust off the street and up onto the sidewalks and into the air conditioners of the apartment building. Thick white grit and dust everywhere. They’ve not repaved yet. Anyway, the landlord was out there sweeping with a man he hires to act as a kind of super here and there were three guys out there standing around I didn’t know. They were right out in front of our apartment and something about it looked a little awkward but the landlord was complaining about the dust and grit and I didn’t know if they might be guys who worked for the company working on the street. I walked past with H.o.p. and started digging through the vacuum cleaner box to the side of the building. My head was buried in the box and then the three men were gone and the landlord was shaking his head. As it turned out one of the guys was someone who had been caught breaking into the cars in the parking garage next to us, had broken into eight cars, and the police had been called and these other two guys were trying to keep him there until the police arrived. In Monday’s posting I noted how angry Marty had gotten with the police ticketing every car on the street when they can’t be bothered to be anywhere around when cars are broken into or to respond in decent time to a burglary or disturbance call. So, these guys were trying to keep this thief there until the police arrived and the police were being slow about it. Then the manager of the building behind us (the parking garage is a part of it) came out with a camera to take the guy’s picture. And while I was rummaging looking for the filter the guy took off running. It was a thoroughly unspectacular scene, no scuffle, brooha, no hollering. He ran and the others ran after him. From what I understand he ended up somewhere in the parking lot at the grocery store and the police hadn’t arrived yet and I don’t know what happened eventually.

Fortunately it all happened in such a way where H.o.p. hadn’t a clue what was going on or what had happened. He didn’t know until our landlord related the story.

“You can’t step out that building without having to be alert to something happening!” a friend exclaimed when I told her. “He could have grabbed H.o.p. and used him for a hostage!”

I thought for a second and oh yeah remembered that nearly every place we’ve ever lived in has been broken into. We lived in some apartments in a very nice neighborhood of old homes and even there we were broken into by someone who lived in the building, and periodically people would stumble home bloody from being mugged.

Just across the street we have condos that go for several hundred thousand dollars. The area is just this way. City.

My friend’s right, anything could happen. But I believe a greater threat would have been if the guys trying to retain the guy had instead been security guards with guns.

H.o.p. and I went back inside and returned to what we’d been working on.

Which was looking up pics of big-eyed art.

I remember a friend of mine, when I was 10, liking the big-eyed kid art. Reproductions were everywhere. I never liked them, never thought of them as art. Scarcely even occurred to me that there were people responsible for these commercial, impersonal paintings other than on some corporate level.

Today we were trying to read up some (H.o.p. and I) on the creator of the Power Puff girls, Craig McCracken, and his influences. In an interview we read, the interviewer assumed Japanese Anime was behind the big eyes of the Power Puff Girls, but as it turns out, the post WWII sorry-eyed waifs of Margaret and Walter Keane are the inspiration.

Margaret Keane and Walter ended their 10 year marriage around 1965. In 1970 she claimed she was the sole creator of the big-eyed children and challenged Walter to a paint-off at which he didn’t make an appearance. In 1972 Margaret became a Jehovah’s Witness and her children got brighter and happier. She won her case in court in 1986 when she and Walter were asked to draw some big-eyed art and she did but he said he had a problem with his shoulder and couldn’t.

Walter Keane for some reason was liked by Hollywood. Margaret Keane was in great demand as a portrait painter and painted celebs like Joan Crawford who she made golden glamorous. She painted Jerry Lewis’ family a la early Picasso with Jerry in harlequin tights looking morose. Walter is given as having painted Kim Novak as a child, a portriat she lost in a fire. Walter was apparently somewhat of a womanizer. He was a scene person in San Francisco who toasted “Happen-ness” as he liked making happenings. I’ve read the argument that Walter invented the kids, modeling them on children he’d seen in Berlin when a soldier there post WWII, but that Margaret bettered him and was more enduring. Margaret says they were the product of her sad childhood in the bible belt south. If Margaret Keane did all the paintings of the big-eyed girls, he was the front man who went out, did the television and celeb bit and sold them big. A lot of people still don’t know if all the big-eyed kids were hers or not and some say there was a difference between hers and those painted by Walter. Some people say they can’t imagine why a woman would let a man put his name on her work for twelve years, permitting him the credit.

Maybe the Keane kids were the product of both Margaret and Walter in a way that they wouldn’t have become children of the 50s and 60s without their marriage. He hawked. She painted. They divorced. She took custody. Maybe they both painted them at first differently and smushed them together to become the Keane kids the nation adopted. He became more huckster and showman than artist, spreading them around but the amalgamation was one only she could render artistically. Or maybe it was only her work and he imagined it was his. Maybe he imagined a lot of Margaret was his.

He took credit. He complained of conspiracy.

An old Life interview with Walter Keane has him saying that no one draws eyes like El Greco and Walter Keane. El Greco? Had never occured to me to mark a similarity between El Greco and Keane. But Greco did do a bit of the big-eyed thing. This Magdalene and in particular this Greco.

The Life interview points out that Walter referred to himself in the third person and determined it was big confident ego. I wonder if it’s the result of Walter thinking of the Keane kids as Walter Keanes themselves and their creator as a third party ego. I’m thinking Pygmalion. Did he feel Margaret was dough and he the shake and baker. Maybe he saw her as a medium translating something of him spiritually onto canvas. He wrapped it up in his name. Thus it was Walter Keane.

Margaret Keane said of her creations that the eyes are the windows of the soul. Mark Ryden’s big-eyed paintings of today take one to the darker recesses of the soul’s closet. I read that artists influenced by the Keene kids are Lisa Petrucci, Dave Burke, and Megan Besmirched.

I don’t know if the big-eyed kid pics had worn out their welcome or if Margaret’s swinging to the religious happy side of things made for a fall in popularity, but the big-eyed kid art stopped appearing everywhere. Then there was a resurgence of interest as it became collector popular. Walter died at the age of 85 in 2000. Margaret, at 79, still paints and exhibits.

It’s 8 am and chilly in here. I still don’t care for paintings of Margaret Keane but I read they have something to them in person.

This painting by Mark Ryden is of Christina Ricci. She was a key character in “Ice Storm” so in a sense those big-eyed kids, though paintings of them didn’t appear in the movie, still starred. She was certainly a big-eyed waif in “Ice Storm”.