If You're Going to San Francisco...

... forget all that flowers in your hair stuff. Instead, slap on a fedora, pull on a trenchcoat and fire up a jasper as local artist Owen Smith pays tribute to Dashiell Hammet's private eye classic The Maltese Falcon (arguably ground zero for the genre), with a series of posters commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Art as part of its Market Street 2008 Program. The posters will be installed from Monday, June 16th, to Thursday, September 18th on (where else?) Market Street.

And to kick off the project, Don Herron and Smith will lead one of Herron's popular Dashiell Hammett Tours beginning at the southeast corner of Market and Third Streets on Saturday, June 28th, at 1 PM, absolutely free of charge. You'll get to scope out Spade and Archer’s office and other Falcon landmarks, as well as check out Smith’s posters and hear how he came up with each one.

Artist Owen Smith, of course, was the artist I blabbed on about recently for his amazing Mother Jones "Torture Hits Home" cover.

For more of his Falcon posters, click on the pic below....



I dunno. Maybe it's time for me to finally check out this burg...

If you're going to San Francisco gimme a call.

Torture Hits Home

Wow. I've been a fan of Owen Smith and his pulpy cover illustrations for a long time, ever since I first noticed his work on the cover of The Low End of Nowhere, a novel by Michael Stone featuring his hard-ass Denver bounty hunter and sometime private eye Streeter.

Smith's work subsequently appeared on a few other Streeter novels, but then I began to notice his work -- he has a very distinctive style -- popping up all over the place. An Aimee Man album cover (for which he won a Grammy). Maureeen Dowd's Are Men Really Necessary?. Numerous magazine covers, including The New Yorker and, I think, Sports Illustrated.

Owen's illustrative work is a marvel of swirling, pulpish impressionism that harkens back to the days of public works programs and working class murals as much as it does pulp magazines. It's not really "realistic," but it's vibrant and muscular and there's a throbbing, almost disturbing visceral energy about the way he portrays the people in his paintings. There are no wimps or pretty people in his work -- everyone's built like a bruised brick shithouse.

But his cover for the March/April 2008 issue of Mother Jones is something else again. The theme and title of the issue (and presumably the illustration itself) is "Torture Hits Home" and if you don't think a simple illustration can shock or disturb you, if you can look at this and not squirm, if you can study this picture and simply shrug it off, we all know which side of the torture debate you stand on. And it's far, far away from most of us.

This is illustration played for keeps, a mouthful of blood spit out in defiance. One image, and it makes all the rest of the issue, all those well-intentioned passionate words of condemnation and righteous outrage superfluous.

Look at that illustration. Look at it close.

This is pulp. This is hardcore.

Well done, Mr. Smith.