Entries from July 2007
July 31st, 2008 · Comments Off
The Official Heck Of A Guy Entry In The McHenry County Seal Design Contest
- If It Weren’t For A Couple Of Silly Rules
In yesterday’s post, McHenry County Seal Wars - Return Of The Heck Of A Guy, I boasted that, during an interview with the Northwest Herald,
I had the vision of the perfect McHenry County Seal design. Not only is
the design itself precisely on the mark, but it also clashes with the
requirements set forth in the contest regulations.
Of course, Mohammed Ali has pointed out (as have many others), “It ain’t bragging if it’s true.”
Now you, gentle reader, have the opportunity to evaluate if my declaration that I’ve stumbled onto, to paraphrase Dr. Pangloss, the best of all possible McHenry County Seals is bravado or fact.
The McHenry County Dick Tracy Seal
Slick, eh?
Nonetheless, let’s take a step back to look at the McHenry County - Dick Tracy relationship.
Just In Case You Don’t Know Dick
Today, Dick Tracy is more icon than the heroic detective starring in comics, radio, films, TV (live action and cartoon), board and video games, and books. The description of Dick Tracy in Wikipedia is a serviceable and representative take on that character:
Dick Tracy is a long-running comic strip featuring a popular and familiar character in American pop culture. Dick Tracy is a hard-hitting, fast-shooting, and supremely intelligent police detective who has matched wits with a variety of often grotesquely ugly villains. Created by cartoonist Chester Gould in 1931, the strip made its debut appearance on October 4, 1931, distributed by the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. Gould wrote and drew the strip until 1977.
This post is not, however, an exposition of Dick Tracy exploits; the fact that I don’t have to explain what Dick Tracy represents is, in fact, part of my argument.
More about that in a moment.
Dick Tracy, Chester Gould, And McHenry County
Chester Gould
The Dick Tracy-McHenry County connection lies in the chosen home of Chester Gould, the creator of Dick Tracy, in Woodstock, County of McHenry, State of Illinois.
The following is excerpted from the Chester Gould - Dick Tracy Museum Web Site:
It is not widely known, but most of Chester Gould’s work was actually done 60 miles northwest of the Tribune Tower in his Bull Valley studio, near the rural community of Woodstock, Illinois. …
In 1935, while driving home from a Wisconsin vacation, Gould and his family happened to pass through the tiny farming community of Woodstock and an area just east of town known as Bull Valley. Bull Valley is a stunning area filled with wooded rolling hills and breathtaking vistas. It remains that way today. Chester Gould fell in love with the area and soon purchased an abandoned farm house on 60 acres. The following year, after painstakingly restoring the old farm house, Gould, his wife Edna and daughter Jean, moved to the country.
Beginning in 1936 Gould made the trek from his farm into the big city on a regular basis. Sometimes by train, but most often by car. It is almost inconceivable that any person, in 1936, would commute that distance. No expressways were in existence and in the winter the single lane highways were treacherous. In fact, most of the close in suburbs were bucolic at the time, and towns as close as Des Plaines, Glenview and Arlington Heights, only a few miles from the Chicago city limits, were still surrounded by farms. Woodstock was on the other side of the earth!
Nonetheless, Chester Gould preferred the country small town life and the 60 mile drive was a price he was more than willing to pay. Having grown up in Pawnee, Oklahoma, Gould loved the Woodstock’s rural setting and down to earth people. He was to spend his entire career living and working on that beautiful parcel of land.
In Woodstock, Chester Gould was a good neighbor as well as a celebrity. Many of his comic characters were based on local citizens. “Tiny” the long time Woodstock police chief, is one example. In warm weather, Gould could often be found setting in the beautiful Woodstock Square with his sketch pad in hand. Gould family members were generous contributors to the Woodstock community. Over the years Chester Gould served on the hospital board, invested in local real estate, contributed his drawings to worthy causes and became a beloved figure.
With Dick Tracy’s link to the County, his visage is as legitimate a choice as Lincoln is for seemingly every third governmental and commercial emblem in the State of Illinois.
Why The McHenry County Dick Tracy Seal Is The Best Solution
If the McHenry County Board’s primary goal is, as its members have stated, to replace the current “uninspiring,” “unimaginative,” and “boring” County Seal that is “neither unique to McHenry County nor readily identifiable” with a more desirable version that is, one would infer, inspiring, imaginative, unique to McHenry County, readily identifiable, and not boring, there is no need to even consider designs such as those proposed in January.
Baldly put, such designs are, unless one has the ESP-level sensitivity required to recognize that squarish graphic on the left side of the two proposals, the one that looks like adjacent Ethernet and USB sockets, as (I think) the County Administration Building, just two more examples of the hundreds of imminently forgettable permutations of similar if not identical generic emblems that comprise the typical county seal.
Heck, given the amount of graphic art crammed into most county seals (many counties sport seals filled with, believe it or not, much more of what we county seal critics like to call “crapola” than these examples), designs that are immediately recognizable, let alone distinctive, are rarities.
Now, scroll up to take another look at The McHenry County Dick Tracy Seal near the top of this post.
Pretty darn easy to recognize, right? So it’s identifiable. And, it’s certainly unique to McHenry County and just as certainly not boring. I would even hold that its use on a county seal is imaginative - although admittedly the bar for an “imaginative” county seal is set relatively low. I wouldn’t be surprised if the occasional citizen casting his or her eyes on the county seal found the stalwart Tracy inspiring.
Now, turn your gaze upon those two proposed designs or the current McHenry County Seal or any other county seal you like. Compare, contrast, consider, discuss. Which seal do you remember, which grabs your attention, which design is hot, which is not?
Plus, given the news coverage that accompanied the discovery that the McHenry County Seal was boring, the decision to place Dick Tracy on the McHenry County Seal would seem a sure hit with the press. With a little PR push, a Board member or two might even garner an invitation to chat with Letterman or Leno. In any case, it would appear a good bet that the image would soon become distinctive and readily identified with the County.
Moreover, my subjective assessment is that Dick Tracy is a good fit for McHenry County. Tracy is square-jawed, determined, confident of his own motivation, steadfast in his course of action, extraordinarily competent in his chosen field, loyal to his friends, fearless, upright, forward-looking, and, despite his inborn talent as a babe magnet, faithful to Tess. That set of qualities certainly describes, with a gender-specific change or two, everyone residing within the boundaries of McHenry County - as far as I know.
OK, Dick Tracy could be a tad moralistic. And, yes, he occasionally played fast and loose with the notion of a defendant’s rights. Yes, he maybe once in a while shot first and, well, he didn’t really ask any questions later, he just shot first sometimes.
But, and here’s the point, it’s Dick Tracy the Icon that is featured on the seal, not Dick Tracy the role model. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt apparently had an extramarital fling or two. Do we look for someone to replace them on our currency? It’s as simple as the Good Guy (Dick Tracy) Vs Evil (Pruneface et al). I’m suggesting we put the Good Guy on the County Seal.
The Rules
Some stickler for the rules is sure to point out that the Design Contest regulations include this restriction: “The work must be original, and contain no clip art or other copyrighted material.”
I have two (printable) responses:
- Perhaps it’s because of rules like this that the County hasn’t been able to find an acceptable design yet.
- Does the County want a great seal design or does the County want to follow arbitrary rules? Michelangelo was known to occasionally disregard the edicts of his patrons, the de’ Medici to good effect. I’m willing to emulate that model in micro-miniature.
Besides, I don’t think Dick Tracy would let that kind of bureaucratic hurdle slow him down if he were in hot pursuit of his goal.
Given that the State of Illinois Tourism folks were able to obtain permission to use Tracy in their posters, it hardly seems outrageous to suppose that it might be possible to garner the right to use Dick as the image on the McHenry County Seal.
In fact, commemorating Dick Tracy as a local icon might be karmic compensation for the recent closure of the Chester Gould - Dick Tracy Museum in Woodstock.
Oh, the rules also include “The new McHenry County seal should reflect the rich history and symbolize the character of the County.” I’ve spoken to the “character of the County” issue earlier, but if the “rich history” point is especially important, I’ve prepared a design to cover that.
Alternative Visions
If the right to bear arms folks are interested, Tracy lends himself to that point of view.
And The Final Reason To Put Dick Tracy On The McHenry County Seal?
He Looks Good In A Fedora
Previous McHenry County Seal Posts
- Sealed With A Dis
- The Great Seal Of McHenry County Not Great Enough
- McHenry County Eye Candy
- McHenry County Seal Makeover Makes The News
- Baseball, Hot Dogs, Community College, and County Seals
- The Passive-Aggressive State of Illinois Seal
- How To Create An Official Seal - Part 1: The Mechanics
- How To Create An Official Seal - Part 2: Credentials
- Another Great McHenry County Seal
- Best Option Re Final Candidates For New McHenry County Seal
- The McHenry County Seal Slaughter
- McHenry County Seal Wars - Return Of The Heck Of A Guy
Footnotes
[Read more →]
Tags: Fascinations · Local
July 30th, 2008 · Comments Off
McHenry County, Having Apparently Resolved More Important Issues In Past 9 Months, Now Seeks Public Input On County Seal
From the September 12, 2007 Daily Herald, County Seal In Line For Extreme Makeover:
Hill said her committee considered holding a contest to design a new seal or seeking public input, but the consensus was that may not be the best use of county resources.
“We have so many more important issues,” she said.
From the June 27, 2008 Northwest Herald, County: Help Us Design New Seal:
A McHenry County Board committee is looking to the public to design a new county seal.
_______________________________
The Change In Strategy
As outlined in the July 28, 2008 Heck Of A Guy post, The McHenry County Seal Slaughter, the designing of the new McHenry County Seal has reached a stalemate, the causes of which are summarized by Kevin Craver, writing in the June 27, 2008 Northwest Herald article, County: Help Us Design New Seal:
True to the old saying that a camel is a horse designed by committee, board members had differing opinions as to what should go on it.
“We came up with several options, and we had seven people saying what they liked and what they didn’t like,” said Management Services Committee Chairwoman Tina Hill, R-Woodstock.
The county presently uses the Illinois state seal and does not have one of its own. And Hill and other board members said the county’s agriculturally themed flag does not reflect the growth and development in recent decades.
The comment on the unsuitability of the McHenry County flag references the original design notion reported in the September 12, 2007 Daily Herald story:
For now, the most likely option is to remake the seal to look like the county flag, with a few modernizing tweaks. The flag features the county name and its year of incorporation along with images of a cow, an ear of corn and a fish jumping above a waterway as the sun sets behind it.
McHenry County Flag
Heck Of A Guy Responds To County Seal Crisis
The Northwest Herald story goes on to discuss the daring design exploits of an unsung local hero:
Local blogger Allan Showalter, who runs the Heck of a Guy blog at
www.1heckofaguy.com, occasionally has followed the county’s efforts to create a new seal. His satiric options have included a seal with space open for local advertising, a human retinal scan, and seals lampooning the County Board’s unsuccessful attempt to ban flash photography on account of fellow blogger Cal Skinner.
Whether he submits some of his old work or comes up with something new, Showalter isn’t counting on winning the contest. Aside from the recognition for creating it, there is no prize.
“If the county had a little more of a sense of humor, it would be a funny thing,” Showalter said.
As a Photoshop-owning McHenry County citizen, my duty was clear. The contest must be joined.
That contest turns out to be …
The McHenry County Seal Design Contest
From the Northwest Herald article, I discovered that “interested people have until Oct. 8 to mail an electronic copy of their seal and an entry form that can be found on the county’s Web site at il.us. The work must be original, and contain no clip art or other copyrighted material. Hill’s committee will pick five finalists from which the County Board will choose.”
In addition, the official entry form declares that “The new McHenry County seal should reflect the rich history and symbolize the character of the County” and requires the entrant’s signature to a paragraph that includes the following:
I agree to donate my work and allow the seal to become the sole property of McHenry County, which will then have the right to modify, promote, and publish the seal in any format without permission, notice or compensation. I understand that two or more entries may be chosen and key elements of each design will be combined. I also understand and agree to make requested design changes if chosen. Should my design be selected, I agree to the release for my name, photo, and posting on McHenry County’s website.
Let’s recap what we know about the County Seal Design Contest and my immediate response to each:
- The winning design is donated to McHenry County.
Well, I suppose that’s implicit in such a contest, although I had hoped to retain movie and foreign distribution rights.
- There is no prize - no money, no medal, no plaque, no letter of recognition, no parade, no key to the county, no tax rebate, no free parking space, no gold star, no trophy, no 5% off the second meal coupon at Chuck E. Cheese or Hooters (winner’s choice).
That’s OK, because I’m just in it for the glory.
- The winning design will be chosen by and may be modified by the County.
If the design chosen has to be modified, then it’s not really the winning design, is it? And are the County officials, who couldn’t come up with an acceptable design in 9 months, the ideal judges to decide what should be modified? Come to think of it, does it make much sense that the same people who couldn’t figure out what they wanted for the past 9 months be the ones making the final choices for this competition? Just a thought.
- “The work must be original, and contain no clip art or other copyrighted material.
OK, the “original” part I get. After all, we don’t want to end up with a recycled seal from Newton County Missouri. I guess it must be the legal issues that are of concern. Otherwise, a ban on clip art seems counterintuitive, given that the much admired County Flag resembles nothing else quite so much as a sheet of miscellaneous clip art.
- Two or more winning designs may be chosen and combined for the final design.
So even if I win, I might have to share the lack of a prize with someone else?
- “I also understand and agree to make requested design changes if chosen.”
Hmmm. First of all, I don’t understand to what the “understand” in this sentence refers; consequently, I don’t understand what it is I am supposed to understand. But, I do understand that entrants must agree that whoever submits the winning design must make any “requested design changes.” That sounds ominous. I mean, it would be humiliating enough to be forced to besmirch ones artistic vision because, say, a Board member has a thing for gladioli and insists that a border composed of these flowers be added to the final design of the seal, but how can one guarantee to be able as well as willing to make indicated changes? Heck, if I were on the Board, I’d first demand that a flaming skull be added to the winning design (unless it already included one - it is surprisingly easy to go overboard with the flaming skulls), then I’d require that the resulting graphic be engraved on a kernel of rice, and finally I’d mandate that the design be rendered in day-glo colors and in such a manner that it is perceived in 3-D without the need for those cheesy glasses. As alternatives, however, I would also accept a design with eyes that seem to be following the viewer or a design that healed leprosy, caused the lame to walk, and resurrected the dead.
- There seems to be something else, an absent quality, something that is missing, but I can’t quite …
Oh, I know what it is. There is nothing I can find about the County’s appreciation of, thankfulness for, or gratitude toward anyone who decides to pitch in and help. There is a lot about what the winner doesn’t get and what the winner must do, but nothing along the lines of an even a “Thanks, buddy” for the winner, let alone a high five, chest bump, or fist bump. In fact, this invitation to the citizenry smacks of resignation and seems forced and joyless. I guess it’s a good thing that I don’t discourage easily.
The Penultimate Heck Of A Guy McHenry County Seal Offering
Just to make it official, I remain convinced that my original official Heck Of A Guy County Seal design recommendation, set forth in Another Great McHenry County Seal, is a quantum leap beyond emblem McHenry County or any other county has implemented. Excerpts from the original post follow:
Personalized license tags have been popular for years
and personalized postage stamps are now routinely available. Now, it’s time for the personalized county seal.
The logistics would be simple enough. McHenry County would keep its current seal as the default. Anyone who needs a county seal applied to a document, however, could, for a fee, select a design from a database or customize his or her own image (much as one chooses an image for a tattoo) that would be placed within a standardized border that would be common to all McHenry Seals. The techniques and tools for seal design, described in How To Create An Official Seal - Part 1: The Mechanics, are already available online . Seals could be completed on the fly in a few minutes or prepared in advance.
… Customers could also purchase the right to customize seals for documents other than their own. For example, a seeker of immortality who couldn’t scrape up a few million to have a library named after him, could afford a different kind of memorial. McHenry could sell seals in blocks of 100, e.g., for a fee, County Seal applications #300-399 would feature the buyer’s preferred design. Or imagine, for example, the bidding for design rights to a seal 20 yard high and 20 yards wide painted on a water tower…
Birthday wishes, marriage proposals, professions of eternal love, knock-knock jokes, …. , all become more impressive with the imprimatur implicit in the McHenry County Seal. And for those with deeper pocketbooks, larger, more openly prestigious seals would be available. If United was willing to pay millions for naming rights to the United Center, there must be a lawyer or bail bondsman willing to fork over a few thousand for the rights to the design of the seals on the courtroom walls for the next two years.
And we would have none of this wimpy “no commercial use” or anti-obscenity restrictions. Let the market deal with it. The county would, of course, tack on a surcharge for advertisements, porn, political statements, and personal attacks.
That’s it - a County Seal that is unique, reflects the character of the citizens of the County, invites participation in governmental affairs, and even brings in revenue. Not bad, eh?
Yet, I suspect that the prospects of the “Your Design Here” County Seal are foredoomed. Unless my spam filter devoured the County’s emailed request to use this scheme, my offer has been unrequited since published here in November 2007.
But despair not, during the interview with the Northwest Herald, I had the vision of the perfect McHenry County Seal design. Not only is the design itself precisely on the mark, but it also clashes with the requirements set forth in the contest regulations.
I have a good feeling about this.
Next: The Final McHenry Seal Design Solution
Previous McHenry County Seal Posts
- Sealed With A Dis
- The Great Seal Of McHenry County Not Great Enough
- McHenry County Eye Candy
- McHenry County Seal Makeover Makes The News
- Baseball, Hot Dogs, Community College, and County Seals
- The Passive-Aggressive State of Illinois Seal
- How To Create An Official Seal - Part 1: The Mechanics
- How To Create An Official Seal - Part 2: Credentials
- Another Great McHenry County Seal
- Best Option Re Final Candidates For New McHenry County Seal
- The McHenry County Seal Slaughter
Footnotes
[Read more →]
Tags: Fascinations · Local
Leningrad Cowboys (click on graphic to view larger image)
Leningrad Cowboys, Where Have You Been The Last 20 Years?
In 1994, the Leningrad Cowboys, a musical group originally formed to play the role of a fictional band in Aki Kaurismäki’s 1989 film Leningrad Cowboys Go America, performed, with support from 70 members of the Red Army Choir, the Lynyrd Skynyrd classic Sweet Home Alabama at the 11th annual MTV Music Awards held at the Radio City Music Hall in New York. According to Wikipedia, 250 million people worldwide watched the program.
Tragically, I was not among them.
Thankfully, the Lord of Leisure directed me to a video of this unforgettable show.
The Phenomenon That Is The Leningrad Cowboys
Dressed in Eastern Bloc knockoffs of Porter Wagner suits and what their web site identifies as “unicorn hairdos and ½ meter long, sharp-pointed shoes,” the entire troop currently consists of 11 Cowboys and 2 Leningrad Ladies, the latter adorned by megabeehives, the most mini of minidresses, and mesh stockings capable of capturing the heart of any male foolhardy enough to approach them.
The band appeared in two other films, The Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses and The Total Balalaika Show, which features the Cowboys and the full 160-member Red Army Choir.
They perform in English, covering songs such as Those Were The Days, Thru The Wire, Stairway To Heaven, and tunes from the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and others as well as performing Russian folk songs and, according to their web site, music referencing “vodka, tractors, rockets, and Genghis Khan.”
Sweet Home Alabama by The Leningrad Cowboys
A fake Finnish band, each member of which has morphed into an hallucinogenic vision of Elvis, singing, with accompaniment by the Red Army Choir, looking, as we say back in the Ozarks, “just happy to be here,” the Lynyrd Skynyrd masterpiece, Sweet Home Alabama - and with no shouted requests for the band to “Play Free Bird.” Does it get better than this?
Well, if there is nothing better, there is at least more. Other Leningrad Cowboys hits available at YouTube follow:
Footnotes
[Read more →]
Tags: Media Mayhem · Music
July 28th, 2008 · Comments Off
So Many Seals, So Little Sense
The Story Thus Far
The epic saga of the McHenry County Seal Replacement just keeps getting better and better - or at least longer and longer.
It seems as though only ten months ago when the McHenry County Board was visited by an epiphany that revealed the awful truth: The McHenry County Seal is - well, no use trying to disguise the catastrophe with a euphemism - the county seal is boring. And, as if that weren’t enough, officials pronounced it, according to the Daily Herald, “uninspiring and unimaginative.”
Yep, you read that right - one of the 3,077 counties that comprise these United States is inexplicably burdened with an official seal that is boring, uninspiring, and unimaginative. And to our everlasting shame, that county is McHenry.
What are the odds?
The McHenry County Bore War
Naturally, no responsible governmental body could knowingly tolerate its citizens being endangered by a malignantly torpid county seal. If that fundamental emblem of governmental authority and affirmation evokes boredom rather than excitement and enthusiasm, how long will it be until the county flag is saluted with stifled yawns? Soon, the county’s official stationery will be accounted bland and placid. Next thing you know, sociopolitical malaise spreads from northern Illinois across the Midwest and then the entire country. Then, a pervasive and profound melancholia suffuses the land. National ennui sets in. Attendance at Wednesday night prayer meetings, professional women’s basketball games, and flea markets dissipates. Sales of new cars. bric-a-brac, and sandwich shop franchises all but cease, hospitals and clinics close their doors, and internet porn downloads drop by 0.003%. International trade stagnates. The only uptick in the economy is the revenue from the upswing in sales of Leonard Cohen songs. Lethargic rioters confront languid police. Chaos listlessly ensues. Bloodless and passionless coups occur in third world countries until mounting apathy precludes such movements.
Consequently, on September 18, 2007, the McHenry County Board launched an offensive campaign against the threat of subversive boredom by unleashing a fully armed, 5-WHEREAS class resolution: The Resolution Authorizing The Exploration Of The Development Of A New County Seal For The County Of McHenry.
It must have been one of those fighting fire with fire things.
According to news stories, the strategy called for appointing a “computer specialist” to develop a design for the new seal that “could be ready for the county board to look at within several weeks.”
The McHenry County Seal Deal: Current Status
Despite The Board’s early optimism that projected a timeframe of “several weeks,” which would have had the seal home for Christmas, the McHenry County Seal Campaign has been locked in a stalemate. The McHenryCountyBlog has it that two designs were finally submitted in January 2008. Readers can access those candidates at Two Proposals Surface for New McHenry County Seal. My take on those designs can be extrapolated from this graphic from Best Option Re Final Candidates For New McHenry County Seal.
These designs proved unacceptable, as have all proposed candidates.
Similarly, the many seal designs I volunteered via the Heck Of A Guy blog, some of which are shown in the memorial below, were casualties to the cause of county seal revision - despite their indisputable anti-boredom qualities.
Memorial To Fallen Heck Of A Guy Designs For The McHenry County Seal
(Click on graphic to view larger image)
Next
Seal Wars - The County Strikes Back
In the next episode, McHenry County, in desperate straits, solicits help from the hoi-polli. Meanwhile, DrHGuy offers the powers that be the ultimate weapon - the perfect County Seal. Will the County have the courage to accept? Or will the forces of lassitude and boredom triumph?
Stay tuned.
Footnotes
[Read more →]
Tags: Local · Self-Referenti
