David Erik Nelson's Blog, page 5

Our Most Important Thanksgiving Traditions 🦃💀

I repost this (or a variant of it) every year. This is a year, and so I repost. QED. After all, without our traditions, we are as shakey as a fiddler on the roof.

1. “What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”

I wrote this essay a few years back, as a little bonus for the folks kind enough to have subscribed to my newsletter.  A good friend, Chris Salzman, was gracious enough to make something pretty of it. I relish the opportunity to reshare it each year, and I’m doing so once again.  Every word here is both true and factual—which is a harder trick than you’d think.

You’ll be 15 minutes into that Lesser Family Feast in Michigan when your mother-in-law will turn to you and ask:

“What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”

You should be prepared for this sort of thing in Michigan. But even though I’m warning you in advance, you still won’t be prepared.…

(read more: IN MICHIGAN: A PRIMER, A TRAVELOGUE)

2. “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!”

THANKSGIVING TURKEY GIVEAWAY! (WKRP in Cincinnati) from Tony DeSanto on Vimeo.

I repost this every year, because I love this gag, and because watching this on TV—and rehashing it with my mom and sisters each year—is one of my fondest holiday memories. But it is, in my humble, a damn-near perfect gag. That’s saying something, because I find single-camera laugh-track situation comedies almost entirely unbearable to watch. If you wanna read more of my thoughts on this specific gag and what it can teach writers, you can do so here.)

3. “…your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs; we will sell our bracelets by the road sides…”4. ♬♫♪ “Caught his eye on turkey day / As we both ate Pumpkin Pie … ” ♬♫♪ 5. The Alice’s Restaurant Massacre (in four part harmony)

I’m a child of the 1980s, so most of my nostalgic holiday memories are TV-related.

I hope your T-day is good and sweet.  Gobblegobble!

Sketch of the Week: Lake Michigan Sunset (Nov 20, 2024) plus a Thanksgiving treat

Both kids unanimously voted for this sketch, which is based on a photo I took in the summer of 2020:

My kids are the small figures playing in the surf near the middle of the image, but that isn’t why they chose it; they both really liked the play of the light on the water and the shadows on the beach.

I have to admit, I’m pleased with how the light on the water came out, too.

As a bonus, I’ve got another sketch from the joke that featured the meditating warrior squirrel from last week. Here he battles a vicious wild turkey:

We’ve Always Been Here, and You’ve Never Liked Us: Exploring Michigan’s First Jewish Burial Ground

It’s my town’s bicentennial year, and the local library graciously granted me the opportunity to write about The Old Jewish Burial Ground here—which was, in fact, the first Jewish cemetery in the state, despite being a fair distance from the Detroit Metro Area (which is where most Michigan Jews have lived).

SPOILER ALERT: the old Jewish burial ground is mostly underneath a big university building that was built in the 1930s, long after that first Jewish community had mysteriously left entirely of their own free will and not for any unpleasant or embarrassing reasons.

An advertisement that ran in the local Ann Arbor newspaper (spring 1852)

Kudos to the library, who agreed to go forward on this endeavor, even though the working title I pitched it under was “We’ve Always Been Here, and You’ve Never Liked Us.”

A sign displayed by anti-Jewish protestors outside a synagogue in Ann Arbor, MI (summer 2024)

Sketch of the Week: Creep (Nov 14, 2024)

This week my son was entirely undecided; he liked everything. I was also pretty pleased, so here’s the full spread for the week:

I did the creep and her victim on different days, and wasn’t as pleased with how he came out, which is why he’s cropped out above. Both of those figures are based on reference photos from The Pose Archives, which I adore.

Tuesday is Yú in a scene from Karuto / Cult.

Monday is a composite of a stretch of beach north of Fisherman’s Island State Park (FUN FACT: most of it isn’t an island; it’s the lakeshore, and may now be entirely inaccessible due to climate change) with some cumulus clouds in my neighborhood. I’m not anywhere near where I want to be with clouds yet.

Wednesday is from a stock photo that’s been kicking around my phone for ages; I used him as a model for a six-limbed samurai squirrel back in June:

The squirrel was part of a joke either with my son or with my mom and sisters; I can’t really recall how I got there. A lot of what I do is the result of off-handed jokes gone too far.

Sketch of the Week: Egret in Apalachicola (Nov 4, 2024) and an Oaxacan Dancer

This is based on a snapshot I took last winter, while visiting the Florida panhandle’s “Forgotten Coast” (which I understand is now its totally obliterated coast, at least in some of the parts we were in). Here’s the reference photo:

I won’t be shocked if someone tells me that isn’t an egret; I’m not much for identifying what I see.

Anyway, the egret wasn’t my son’s vote for this week. He liked this Oaxacan dancer in the big fancy hat:

He was particularly pleased by her clothes. I like her, too.

Sketch of the Week: Strip-mall Sandhill Crane (Oct 29, 2024)

Where I live in Michigan, there are a lot of wetlands. As a rule, when you build something that creates a lot of impermeable surface (like a warehouse or parking lot), you have to create someplace for the water to go, so it doesn’t strain our storm water systems or deliver a concentrated flow of surface pollutants to the rivers.

In practice, that means that lots of rust-belt Michigan office buildings and strip malls (i.e., the natural environment where I grew up, riding skateboards and bikes and playing tag and setting off fireworks and playing with slingshots) have little scrubby neglected wetlands next to them. These can become remarkably healthy and resilient little ecosystems all their own. I saw this little guy (who I’m 90% sure was a juvenile sandhill crane) while sitting in the car outside a Target waiting for my wife. If you could zoom out on this sketch a click or two, you’d see an Applebees and a freeway and an abandoned Chuck E Cheese—the many vibrant biomes of Southeast Michigan!

I believe sandhill cranes were endangered in Michigan when I was a kid. They were certainly a rare and exciting sight. Now they’re getting to be almost a pest species in some places. Every spring they take it into their head that a section of paved bike trail in Island Lake Park belongs to them and attack the unwary. A pal of mine got a black eye from one. #PureMichigan

My son was really excited by how the reflections came out on this one, as am I. Water is really, really hard to unsee enough to capture it in graphite.

Sketch of the Week: Old Skull (Oct 23, 2024)

‘Tis the season!

My son really liked the depth on the skull, but his actual vote for this week’s Sketch of the Week was this one of Mr. Hori from the film Noroi: The Curse, noting “the expression … is incredible”:

I personally was unhappy with how I elongated the face; Mr. Hori’s face is fundamentally round, but my hand kept wanting to regularize him against Munch’s “Scream,” I guess .

I do feel like I get at least close to the extremity of Mr. Hori’s terror in that scene. (The actor, Satoru Jitsunashi, is pretty amazing in that role; he totally makes the movie for me.) Here’s the reference image (more or less; I was working from several stills I grabbed from the movie, because his whole face wasn’t ever in frame at once):

💀🔥

Enjoy Halloween with this floating flaming crystal skull digital fidget thingy.

Comedy is the Best Horror🎃

A lot of my favorite horror films are SNL digital shorts. I’ve been mulling this over for years now (in fact, I just spent the last hour writing about this from a craft perspective, a screed that I mercifully deleted rather than sending).

I think it all comes down to this: horror in film basically relies on four tools:

jump scaresmounting dreadsquick (e.g., gore, body horror, and torture porn)uncanniness

Jump scares are easiest, mounting dread takes the most time, and squick is often the best way to cash in or make a name for yourself. But it’s always the uncanniness I’m after in horror, that experience Freud described as abruptly seeing the “familiar and old-established” as strange and alien, thus giving the sense of revealing a deeper truth “which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

It’s the horrific uncanniness I love in these comedy skits. In part, this arises from what’s implied about the universe that the characters live in, all the stuff that’s outside the frame (e.g., Jason’s refrigerator, the pizza beast, the old woman across the street, that high school). 

But I think the key element—the thing that pushes this beyond “the familiar and old-established made strange and alien” and into the territory of “that which ought to have remained hidden being dragged up into the light” is the fact that the world we actually really live in—where I’m sitting and typing and you’re sitting and reading and we’re both watching these little 3-minute-gems—is also outside the frame.

The awful thing the characters in the movie are about to experience? It’s already happening here. Hell, it’s us. And we’re laughing.

For your viewing pleasure:

“My Best Friend’s House”“Touch Up”“Almost Pizza”“Lonely Christmas”“Cockblocked”“After High School”“Tasty Toaster Tarts”“Unedited Footage of a Bear” —> the unskipable Claridryl ad —> the uncanny Claridryl reality that may or may not be part of the unskipable Clarifryl ad

Sketch of the Week: Sunset, Skyline, Power Lines (Oct 18, 2024)

This week’s sketch is watercolors and India ink, of a house up the street after the sun has dipped below the treeline, but is still above the horizon:

Back when I was a teen I was taught two ways to use India ink: dip pen and bamboo calligraphy brush. You can do a lot with either, but Jesus are they fiddly. Also, the old bottle of India ink I have is not waterproof, which is great for certain effects, but often maddening overall (esp. against watercolor).

So this was done with Faber-Castell Pitt pens, which are amaaaaazing. Yeah, a dip pen can give you a much finer line, and an ink brush can do really interesting dry-brush and textural things that you can’t coax out of a Pitt pen. But in terms of bang-for-buck (esp. when the “buck” translates to hair-pulling frustration), the Pitt pen is hard to beat:

The India ink is dark and flat and deep, water soluble/flowable when first applied, but then dries absolutely waterproof. They have a ton of different nibs. For this sketch I used a 0.3 fine liner and a soft-brush (the later nicely emulates doing wet-brush work with a Japanese calligraphy brush, giving you all the expressiveness and none of the sorrow). The color of the sky was me experimenting with wet-on-wet watercolor.