Animation Industry Legend Michael Spooner reflects on his career, his life, and what’s next. I had a chance to chat with Michael back in 2008. He’s been busy since then.
Category Archives: Art/Style
Dog
I can hear him out in the kitchen,
his lapping the night’s only music,
head bowed over the waterbowl
like an illustration in a book for boys.
He enters the room with such etiquette,
licking my bare ankle as if he understood
the Braille of the skin.
Then he makes three circles around himself,
flattening his ancient memory of tall grass
before dropping his weight with a sigh on the floor.
This is the spot where he will spend the night,
his ears listening for the syllable of his name,
his tongue hidden in his long mouth
like a strange naked hermit in a cave.
—Questions About Angels by Billy Collins
The Walmart Effect
From The Atlantic: New research suggests that the company makes the communities it operates in poorer—even taking into account its famous low prices.
“In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses.”
“..poverty increases by about 8 percent in places where a Walmart opens relative to places without one even when factoring in the most optimistic cost-savings scenarios.”
“When Walmart comes to town, it uses its low prices to undercut competitors and become the dominant player in a given area, forcing local mom-and-pop grocers and regional chains to slash their costs or go out of business altogether. As a result, the local farmers, bakers, and manufacturers that once sold their goods to those now-vanished retailers are gradually replaced by Walmart’s array of national and international suppliers. (By some estimates, the company has historically sourced 60 to 80 percent of its goods from China alone.) As a result, Wiltshire finds, five years after Walmart enters a given county, total employment falls by about 3 percent, with most of the decline concentrated in “goods-producing establishments.”
Photos by Alison Mays
I justified replacing my one-year-old iPhone 15 by gifting it to my niece Alison. I’d forgotten what an excellent photographer she is.
Cliché by Billy Collins
My life is an open book. It lies here
on a glass tabletop, its pages shamelessly exposed,
outspread like a bird with hundreds of thin paper wings.
It is a biography, needless to say,
and I am reading and writing it simultaneously
in a language troublesome and private.
Every reader must be a translator with a thick lexicon.
No one has read the whole thing but me.
Most dip into the middle for a few paragraphs,
then move on to other shelves, other libraries.
Some have time only for the illustrations.
I love to feel the daily turning of the pages,
the sentences unwinding like string,
and when something really important happens,
I walk out to the edge of the page and, always the student,
make an asterisk, a little star, in the margin.