Whither My Wilderness?

I had to take a rotten picture of the drawing I've chosen for this entry, even though I have a fairly good scan of the picture, because Apple sucks! The syncing didn't go well, or I messed up the syncing, and since I'm a customer that means they messed it up, or maybe Microsoft messed it up. Those guys. Never trust a company with publicly traded stocks, for complicated reasons that I won't go into because I wouldnt have any idea of how to draw a picture illustrating the situation. But now that I say that I've already got something in mind. 

Anyway, I wanted to use this picture, because I wanted a picture of a cabin and for some reason in my memory it was a cabin, but as the Reader can see, it is not really a cabin:

I was kind of envisioning the scene as taking place in a ski resort type of village, an alpine village, but my general inability to draw, which is a grievous failing for someone who wants to be an artist, hindered the vibe of that alpine village from emerging. 

I wanted a cabin because I have just finished reading One Man's Wilderness, a book taken from the journal of Dick Proenecke (spelling?), a guy who built a cabin in Alaska and lived in it mostly alone for a large portion of his life. Kind of like a non-fiction version of Walden. In his journal Proenecke goes on about the difference between building something completely on your own with your own hands, and the difference in the feeling you have about your work when it's all yours, and I felt a deep sympathy with what he was doing, and I felt like I understood his desire to go live by himself in the wilderness, I felt it would appeal to me to do the same, except of course that if I tried to do the same thing I would quickly die, and I recognized that whereas Proenecke could build a cabin and outhouse out of trees he cut down himself, and use a gun to kill a ram for food, and fix everything himself, I would be able to draw some awkward pictures of the wilderness  before I froze or starved. And I came to the realization that my cabin in the wilderness, where I go to escape the world, will have to be in my mind, inadequately rendered on paper. 

So I came up with the idea of emulating Proenecke with my own Cabin in the Wilderness Project, PWC, which will take inspiration from Proenecke and source materials from photos of actual wilderness cabins, and also these drawings of houses which I drew under the direction of my offspring

Playmobil uber Lego part III; Peaceful Coexistence within our grasp

I didn't intend to make the Lego Playmobil post a trilogy, and I did have an extremely serious post in mind to do instead of this post which I am actually writing, but I could not resist the opportunity to illustrate a point which I made earlier and might have undermined with my own irresistible instinct to absolute honesty; that is my posting of photos of some kid art done by my child with Legos in a post which trumpeted the creative nature of Playmobil toys as superior to Legos. I believe I sufficiently explained why those photos did not undermine my point, but just to emphatically underline the explanation of the non- undermining photos I have taken some photos of a piece done with Playmobil:

I won't pretend to understand what's going on here in terms of the larger themes explored in the piece, but I am convinced that any intellect powered by even an average amount of neurocomputing circuits could quickly and easily grasp that the creative medium employed here compares favorably to the medium utilized in the pieces depicted in the previous post, in terms of expressive possibilities and lack of predetermined content. 

I originally discovered the work in late evening under dim lighting, but refrained from capturing the piece at that time due to its association and unpleasantly reactive nature with some sinister and anxiety-producing connotations in my own mind, and I was forced to flee the room. There has been some political ferment in the house of late due to some recent unpopular parental decisions, and I am well aware of the artistic themes presaging the Jacquerie in medieval France. I think the reader will agree that the daylight softens the impact of the piece, and the gentle spirit of reasonableness and cooperation, inherent in the English Parliamentary system for instance, seems to sing happily from the scalped but firmly attached heads on the smiling people to the carefully curated accessories arranged with the respectful care of a smithsonian exhibit, clearly denoting a peaceful surrendering of some symbolic powers in return for a long and dignified armistice. 

I will not trouble the reader with the uncanny transformation of the overall message effected by the dimming of direct light

More on Modding; Prevercursive Canonization

Just to continue some thoughts from the previous blog, something I rarely am able to do, I discovered a whole other level of "modding" the other day; the concept of "canon" as it relates to fan fiction. I knew about canonical text as it relates to religious discussion about scripture; different scholars representing different sects arguing over which ancient texts "belong" in the bible or as scripture , i.e., are divinely inspired.  But in the world of fan fiction, as far as I've been able to tell, "canon" means that a story from a particular story's universe has been published with the approval of the story's author or holder of the legal rights to the story, as indicating a continuation of the story. 

So a piece of fan fiction might be published on the web, but could not be sold to anyone or be charged for viewing without the approval of the copyright owner. I think. That's my vague kind of understanding of it. But the copyright holder could suddenly choose a piece of fan fiction and approve it as part of the official storyline, and publish works with characters and plots that refer to the events in the "canonized" story as having happened in their universe. But it seems that in the eyes of the fans, the legal copyright holder is not considered as authoritative, with regard to canon, as the original author.  The word "author" comes from "authority" after all. Or the reverse, but my point holds true either way. With The Lord of the Rings, for instance, a work I myself was once quite excited about, people were attentively judging the eponymous movies for their adherence to the original books. I would count myself among these people, who regarded the original books, by Tolkien, as "Canon," although I did not use that exact word. And I watched the movies with a highly critical eye as to their agreement with the books. I would never have considered the movies to be "canon", unless Tolkien himself had written and directed them. I always viewed the movies as a lesser work, to be judged as they agreed with the books, which I now realize is a quasi-religious attitude. I've actually seen movies based on other books, movies that have been given enthusiastic approval by the author of the book them self, that I myself have intensely disliked as much as I loved the book. I would say that this seems to indicate that print holds greater authority over the human subconscious, except that I've experienced the opposite effect, with The Shining for instance, where the movie felt like the canon, and the book, which was the original and parent work, read to me like an inferior novelization.   This might be a tribute to Stanly Kubrick's artistry, or it might merely be more simply and disappointingly attributed to my having seen the movie first. 

Which makes me wonder what someone's attitude would be if they happened to read the omnipresent fan fiction for a certain universe before they read the canon. You can do this easily on the Internet. I've read and seen many comic panels and illustrations that I didn't even realize were fan fictions because I knew nothing about the original comics. Deadpool for instance. I've never read the canon at all, and the same for all the satirical or fan fiction works based on the manga comics.  I'd expect to find the canon markedly superior, of course, except for incredibly rare instances where a gifted person may have the economic freedom and the inclination to devote huge amounts of time to a fan fiction work. But why would they, except as a form of perverse exaggerated humility?  Such a person would be a creative, but the opposite of an "author."  A sub-author. An under-author. The written version of an inker. A "wrinker": One who insists on composing fan fiction only, for no money even though they have the talent to create excellent original work of their own. 

But there's a lower level; someone who mods only the work of unpublished authors. Perverse in reverse, you could say, or "preverse", to use a wording from "Doctor Strangelove" that I've finally found a use for. Preverse, as in Prevert: One who insists on modding only unpublished work. But I'm thinking that maybe Prevert applies more to someone like myself, someone who mods only their own, unpublished work, which is more the reverse of humility, in a kind of endless recursive loop. Preverse, as in; "I find your work preversely solipsistic, especially when you took everything wrong with the original and made it worse."

I guess the whole concept of canon fascinates me because it reveals the hierarchical and religious instinct in the human brain. I understand copyright as a way to protect work and motivate creativity, but only the hierarchical mind could conceive canon and take it seriously. Why did I judge the LOTR movies on the books, really?  So what if the original author wrote them?  Why couldn't someone make the original better? 

What if someone took everything I've posted to the Internet and re-worked it to make high art?  Well, that would be insulting and I'd have to sue them, even while acknowledging their genius. But I'll probably lighten up about it after I've died. 

This seems to be a ridiculously solipsistic and empty post itself, but I had to work hard to overcome autocorrect while coining the new words. Perhaps Autocorrect is the true preversion. 

My Ideas for Playmobil in their time of need

While reading  my previous post on this blog (somebody has to), I realized that I had illustrated my pro playmobil post with pictures of Legos, and no playmobil pieces. This may seem, to many people who don't understand the volatility of child toy usage patterns, and it's complex inter-relation to parent child political struggles, that I have somehow disproved my own point, whether through ignorance or through the sinister workings of a subversive subconscious. The truth of any situation will always surpass the explicative power of a few hundred words on a blog post to even the most discerning reader, but I will try to summarize; at time of the post, the Playmobils had recently been put away by parental decree, the Lego creations depicted in the post were out on a temporary permit, issued by house rules. 

I was simply trying to illustrate that we are absolutely not an "anti-Lego" house, and that I am very familiar with the creative possibilities of the toy. But it also illustrates an unmistakeable advantage of Legos, that playmobil will have to combat, if they care to. Maybe they don't want to be a bloated corporation like Lego. They might be perfectly happy to leave the mass market share points to Lego. 

But if they do want to make it a fight without whoring their sets to Hollywood, I have come up with a plan; Mods. Mods, or "user modifications" as we older folks used to call them, are the new subversive creativity, the youngsters call it hacking from the computer hijinks we've all grown to adore from the unbelievably annoying online security measures they've forced everyone to adopt. 

You can hack everything now, people call them "life-hacks", but really most of these hacks are Mods, a more positive less hostile sort of idea. There are mods for games and hardware and re-mixes for songs, and mash-ups, and parodies and re-edits for books and movies. And they all signify a spirit of creative play, taking something and reworking it. They also signify the work of someone with a lot of time on their hands, or a "kid", as I would call them. 

My idea for the playmobil Mods would require the marketing of 3D printers, purchase of which would be no problem for the playmobil demographic, who tend to be educated and rich. The company could partner with some hip 3D printer company in the promotions, collaborating to produce the software and electronic designs and specs which would enable the kids to print whatever mod they wanted for their playmobil toys, from hats and clothes to different heads and faces and bodies, different hair, little food items, animals, swords for the soldiers, little versions of objects and people in their own life, anything.   Here's an idea of mine; rock band hair, with guitars. 

Fun!  People can choose their own colors of course. 

I wouldn't be surprised if they already do something like this on their web page with the stickers and labels they include in their sets. Mods.  Here's another couple ideas; a big cowboy hat on the guy, and I turned the lady into an elephant lady:

And the great thing about my Mod strategy is if Lego copycats it like they did the stickers, it would have a Trojan horse effect on their marketing, because the Mods would undermine the whole Lego shtick; if you can print whatever shape you want, why do you need the brick shape?  People who buy Legos for the movie sets, who just want the brand, could buy the brand in 3D template form and skip the bricks. 

Of course the Modding could subvert the Playmobil product as well, but this would depend on what kind of materials the 3D printers could feasibly produce in the immediate future. Eventually any toy could be 3D printed by any consumer. The toy industry will need visionary leaders (ahem, clears throat significantly and strikes marble statue type pose)  to guide them through the terrifying changes ahead. 

The Legos and the Playmobils should be Friends

I've read some interesting online discussion about the Lego versus Playmobil controversy. Usually I  respond to any escalating dispute as a peacemaker, seeking to placate both sides, to soothe the savage feelings that tend to erupt over exchange of emotional injuries. 

But this time I'm afraid the Lego people have gone too far. 

An unfortunate by product of technological advance in this country has been an over empowerment of young people, specifically tweens and teens. These overindulged simpletons (Am I overusing "over"?  Not in this case!) have mistaken their superiority, over older people, with iPhones and game boys and social  media, with superior knowledge on anything else. While young minds are quick and alert and adaptable, they labor under a crippling mental handicap; a hyper-sensitive internal coolness barometer. This HSCB hampers any attempt at careful thought in those afflicted with it, and has led to outrageously ignorant Internet commentary on all aspects of society, even including toys. 

Deep breath, enjoying the brief chance to waggle my finger admonishingly at young people. I wonder if there's some kind of Freudian symbolism going on there. 

Back to the Lego people's comments. First, the claim to superior creativity because with Legos you can build whatever you want. This is indeed a neat-o thing about Legos. Once. It was once a neat-o thing about Legos. The actual greedy disgusting corporation that runs Lego (remember them?) has steadily subverted that one and only great thing about about Legos by replacing all the free form block sets with crap Disney movie and Star Wars and super hero themed sets with blocks that are shaped to be a particular piece of the set and do not lend themselves to free form building. Don't get me wrong, I buy Lego sets for my kids, and they still re-work them into their own design, but only after they've lost a portion of the tiny blocks and have to get creative. Kids do that with ANY toy, or any thing at all, actually. Even Playmobil. They mix it all up, they have cheap junk happy meal toys playing with Lego people and fuse beads shapes on the deck of a playmobil boat sailing to a couch island with a junk cardboard box mansion.  Kids make up their own stories, if you let them. 

But I see disturbing things going on with a particular brand of toys. The Lego Woody has a name. The kid doesn't get to name them. The Lego Jessie, the Buzz, the Merida, the Elsa, they have their own names and stories, odiously foisted on them through, gack, "branding" agreements between corporations, chosen by a cynical marketing team in a bloated toy corporation.

 The playmobil people have no names, the kids make up their own stories, their own personalities, for them. That is creativity.  Not movie theme sets. And I won't even touch the grotesquely dishonest theme of the Lego Movie. I will only say that the show was an entertaining grown up movie marketed to children, with an awkward and creepy surreal ending tacked on for what I can only assume was a lame attempt at seriousness. 

The funniest criticism of Playmobil by the Lego people, to me as an actual parent with real kids who play with toys, is that sadly uninformed trope that the Playmobil sets have boring details that only appeal to the adults buying them. Nobody with kids could believe that. My kids love those boring details. People don't seem to really get that to a kid, everything in the world is either food or a toy. Kids want to drive cars, that's why there are toy cars. Kids want to change baby diapers. That's why there are baby dolls who have fake diapers. They want to do yard work. That's why there are toy rakes and shovels. Kids want to do everything grown ups do.  Everything is a toy to them. That's why parents have to say "Stop, that's not a toy," all the time. Toys are what kids are allowed to play with, not necessarily what they want to play with. Kids want their toys to look like the things grown ups play with. That's why they do. That's why kids, at the creative, pre-school stage in their life, like Playmobil. When they start school, and get peers, and begin the long dreary trudge through the harness of Cool, and suffer through the intense need for peer approval that dominates the teens, and have their sense of fun and creativity hammered out by the clothing and music and entertainment corporations (Pure Evil) that market to Cool, they have to give up liking Playmobil. Lego is acceptable for a long time though. Totally cool. 

Honest Evaluation of Drawing Skills

Reviewing another old drawing that I don't believe I ever put in a sklog. 

I drew it while standing under the ominous statue in DC of Ulysses S Grant on horseback facing somewhere that I don't exactly remember because I for some reason thought it faced the Capitol, but looking closely at the picture or even looking rather lazily at the picture one can quickly ascry the Capitol behind the statue, so the statue faces out from the Capitol as if guarding the Capitol from some threat emerging from the Lincoln Memorial, maybe protesters. 

That joke rings so familiar in my mind that I believe that I may actually have done something about the statue drawing  before and included that joke.  How very sad. 

This picture represents, I believe, the acme of my career as a journalistic cartoonist, not because I ever got paid for it but in that I flatter myself that it looks like something that might have gone into a newspaper as part of a think piece about Washington or big government or statues in general. I drew it the last time I went to DC which was about 2002, it was raining and they weren't allowing anyone in the White House and there were cops everywhere guarding everything. 

I had recently turned 35 and had therefore passed the first qualifying hurdle on the path to the Presidency, and I was experiencing continual improvement in my drawing skills, and I had already begun planning my own biographical museum, to be built on the mall on the site of the current American History museum. It was a heady time, and one can see the hopeful euphoria in the intense effort I put into drawing a statue I didn't like while standing in the rain in a city I had never much cared for (except for the museums and its contribution to the TV series "Veep").  Now the original sits on display in the museum I have set up in our basement, a far cry from the magnificent many-storied edifice I once envisioned, which would have had fountains and delis and gift shops and naked statues and my actual body laminated like the body worlds exhibit and an animatronic of myself delivering a withering criticism of American Culture.  Yet I visit it often, sadly, silently weeping into my whiskey, enduring the picture's rebuke for allowing my popularity levels to plummet and my drawing skills to wither and regress. Now I often wonder if I will ever be President, and these days this is the best I can do for Grant and his damn horse:

Amateurish, I know, horrible computerized cartoon, completely lacking the gravity of the original. But hey, look what the horse can do now!

Milestone for the TransHagenart Movement

I've undertaken a new project in my ongoing (and selfishly motivated) quest to automate my personal creative output to the level of James Michener or HR Giger or Woody Allen or any professional photographer, hoping someday to be able to simply say a one-word theme into my phone to compose, with the aid of complex algorithms, a realistically awkward doodle with all the subtle signature quirks of my personal drawing style, along with text notes which would meander in an unmistakably personal way and completely fail to come to the point of whatever vague theme I'd  originally tried to generate a series of personalized reflections upon. At a certain point in the future I will set this blog to randomly generate such themes from the news of the day, ensuring that my unique voice and personality will be ignored in the midst of centuries of online chatter. Immortality will be mine!

In my ongoing efforts toward this admirable goal, I have been studying computer aided illustrative techniques to convert photos of myself and family into illustrated graphic novel type characters. Exhibit A, a photo of myself:

Using a vector based illustration app, I converted the photo into the following illustration by simply tracing over the photo, something a computer could do very easily:

Of course there are several apps out there which can turn a photo into a remarkably convincing replica of a painting or drawing, but a vector based illustration can be moved by simply changing the coordinates of the vectors. For instance, I change some coordinates to illustrate the complex emotion of dismay:

Or, more fittingly for this milestone, triumphant joy:

I like to to contemplate this picture of my immortal electronic self, contemplating the eternal cosmos. 

Exploring Alternate Sklog Universe

This is a science fiction themed entry in that it explores what might have been in an alternate universe if I was unemployed at the time that I drew on this sketchbook page and still had time to do sklogs with kids and a house. 

I never made a sklog out of this sketchbook page but if I had and still didn't care about wasting time and ruining sketchbook pages with illegible notes that gave me pain to write because handwritten notes can not be edited except through photoshop (which I have done and it is incredibly fulfilling to do that) but also gave me joy because handwritten notes and limited space on a tiny sketchbook page make you feel brave and risky and the exhilaration of the inexorable permanence of what you put down makes up for the pain of knowing you could have been funnier or more insightful or that if you did get something funny on the page that it could have been legible - then I would have written an incredibly powerful few spidery sentences that would have meandered unpredictably around the doodles of my daughter and her visions of houses as expressed by my peremptorily commissioned pen while exposing the grand illusion that has fueled the American housing market. It sends a chill down my spine and tears to my eyes just to think of what those sentences might have sounded like if Patrick Stewart or Jon Hamm or even Jeff Bridges would have read them. Ooh they would have been good. They would have somehow expressed the constant nagging repairs to toilets and sinks and doors and light switches and sprinklers and window screens and the miles and miles of cords that electronic devices require and syncing and wifi-ing and hidden fuse boxes that the repair guy asks you about that you have to admit you have no idea where it is because you just turn everything off and on until it works and painting and painting because you don't have a landlord to fix everything and forbid you from using plugs or re-painting the rooms and who you can just demand that they talk to noisy neighbors and who has to worry about the housing market while you don't care. All the new home technology is designed by urban apartment dwellers who loathe landlords and everyone in the suburbs and don't mind vexing landlords and homeowners with their devices that are neat but barely worth the pain of installation and upkeep much like the xeriscaped lawns also devised by apartment dwellers that parents don't want their kids to play on because of the rocks and prefer grass that is unnatural and requires vast amounts of carbon stomping effort to maintain. The only good things about a house are basements and backyards, where just for a few short sweet moments you can actually live the king of your own little castle dream that the home market sells you, the places hidden from neighbors (unless you have no basement or visually secluded backyard, in which case you better have a great attic) where you can breathe free of judgement and install your model trains and game centers and your maps and comfortably ugly furniture or drink a beer on a lawn chair or wander out to look at the sky in your boxers, but even those precious gems of home ownership carry the seeds of modern anxiety, the security risks of backyard basement windows, necessitating home security systems that are even more annoying than regular fun home electronics or dogs, which are even more annoying than almost anything except for relatives and door to door solicitors.  Solicitors are the only thing that make the dogs worth it. The loud baying has a salutary effect on the brevity and aggressiveness of any sales pitch. 

And now we come full circle, where I would have, might have cleverly compared the baying of the dogs to the constraints of the medium, the handwritten notes on the tiny sketchbook pages, imposing a salutary limit to the final, inevitable comparison of my own ranting, intolerably lengthened by the storage capacity of the Google-provided page, to the mindless and aggressively unending chatter of the door to door salesman, with nothing but the slow dawn of his sense of futility to force his much welcomed slinking departure from someone else's stage

Scenes From a Radio Station

I've decided to take a trip through memory lane by reviewing some of sklogs I did about the non-profit radio station where I worked for a while. I'd originally thought to include only the sklogs done while I was actually an employee at the station, but after looking through the sklogs, I discovered that my memory has played tricks on me; I didn't do any sklogs while I worked at the station. I started posting the sklogs more than a year after I'd left the station, and I did all the posted drawings of the radio station's offices and control room and volunteer events as a hanger-on, not even as a proper volunteer. Here's one from a meeting I attended at Brewvies, attended by programming staff and on-air volunteers:

I have no idea what I was doing at this meeting. I never had anything to do with programming as a staff member.  I utilized the station CD library - the bitterly contested subject of this meeting- but not for on-air programming, just for...my own enjoyment, basically. It seems a little shameful to admit now. That is the dominant feeling I have, when reviewing these old pictures; shame.  And for more than just being an odiously lazy and selfish hanger-on.  There were many hangers-on in the station volunteer community, people who just showed up at events and meetings and maybe manned the station's tent-booth at one or two events a year or subbed for a couple shows in that same period, and there were the rare few like myself who did absolutely nothing but make copies of CDs from the library and attended a few meetings. This would make me less ashamed if there hadn't been a core group of extremely diligent and helpful people who subbed for a lot of shows, even the late night shows that the programming director would tear his hair out over. These people went to the meetings too, but they probably had more emotionally invested input than I did, by which I mean they attended the meeting with the idea of discussing a problem which they wished to solve, whereas I attended all the meetings to create an unrecognizable portrait of the people attending the meeting which I would scan and upload to my now defunct web page with as many uninteresting comments as I could fit on the page, thereby destroying whatever tattered scraps of aesthetic value the drawing had been able to hold together from my original doodling. Then I would proudly email all the people who had attended the meeting to let them now I'd created a piece about them, and invite them to follow the provided link to view and enjoy it. 

Then over the next day or so I would maintain a close watch on my inbox for any emails pertaining to the sklog. If they contained polite complements, I would print them for future review. If they contained the slightest hint of criticism I would delete them and lock myself in the bathroom for a few hours. If the message from a sklog recipient contained no mention of the sklog but asked how I was doing or what movie I'd seen or what books I'd been reading I would shriek with physical pain, remove the sender from my contacts, pray for immediate death by lightning strike, and lock myself in the bathroom. 

It was a pleasant time in my life that I look back to with great fondness. I also drew some sklogs of volunteer DJs in the control room while they did their show. 

I drew these while sitting at one of the guest mics in the booth. 

There's a mic on a bendy robot arm looking thing that you can move around, and a counter where you can put your notes or laptop or a good book if you like reading.  You're facing the DJ, so you can make a signal to them if they're talking too much or slurring their words. 

 If I were the manager of the radio station I would do all my desk work at one of the two guest mic seats in the booth, and would make occasional comments on the mic, just to let people know I was there. If someone called me I could put them on the air or talk about what they'd said after. And I would do a sklog as I worked, and that would be my only interaction with station staff. They would have to decipher my instructions from random on air comments and the sklog. Unless they wanted a raise. Then they would have to ask me on air, with all the station donors listening

Trial by Water and the Innovation of VPC

On the same trip that I saw all the ranches, we also took a ferry to Victoria. Victoria the city. Prior to going, I had when describing the plan referred to Victoria Island as the ultimate destination, but we actually went to Vancouver...Island. Not to Vancouver the city. For some inexplicable reason human beings seem to be addicted to confusing and overlapping and anarchic geographical terms, so the Canadians gave the island the same name as the city which is not on the island, and gave the city on the island a completely different name. Similarly, here in Utah, we have the largest city in the state, called Salt Lake City, in Salt Lake County, the most populous county in the state. This is acceptable and easy to remember. But in a few decades the largest city in the county and the state will be West Valley City, an odiously bland and bureaucratic name for a gigantic subdivision of Salt Lake City which is not part of Salt Lake City. What do visitors make of the name West Valley?  Why not call it What Valley City?  Even North Las Vegas has a better name. 

Anyway, we took a ferry to the island. I'd looked forward to this ferry ride as I had many fond memories of taking ferries in Puget sound many years before. But some misgivings prowled at the dimly lit corners of my mind. Although I had not experienced any sea sickness on those previous ferries, they had all been in Puget sound, whereas this ferry to the island would traverse the mouth of the sound, with some possible exposure to oceanic waves, and to the possibility of the motion sickness forever associated in my mind with the open sea, both for myself and the unfortunates to whom I have bequeathed a portion of my DNA. 

This possibility was vividly pushed to the forefront of my consciousness by several episodes of car sickness experienced by my older child during our ventures through the Washington Rockies. I purchased Dramamine for the kids, but held back for myself, unwisely. The ferry turned out to have more exposure to the waves than I feared, and my time afloat was haunted by the expectation of nausea (the word itself derives from the same ancient Latin root as the word nautical).  But necessity is the mother of invention, and in the absence of pharmaceutical aids I was able to devise a scientifically based system for managing the revolting motion of the ship. I call the technique Visuo-Proprioceptive-Calibration, or VPC. I stayed on the upper deck of the ferry, in the intense cold wind, abandoned by my family (all safely drugged except for my steely nerved wife, who is completely immune to such troubles), and focused my vision on the deck railing and its motion relative to the horizon. This motion aligned exactly with the lurching motion my senses were experiencing with each malignant wave, and gave my stomach a constant reassurance that maintained its contents in a peaceful state. I include visual aids along with my journal entries from the trip:

1515

No waving movement at all. Extremely windy. Ominous whitecaps. 

Smoke above the city. A warning?

Mistook a man's spoon for a selfie stick. Felt awful about it. Infant crying. 

1530

It has begun. First dip. Mount baker. 

Wind worse 

1545

Halfway. Two railing dips

1601

Two thirds 1.75 to 0.5 railings, quick.  Open ocean to west or right. Port?

1615

Ship slowing down. Still windy. Measured a 3.5  maybe 4 rating wave at time of turn. Going down to survey damage

Ranches

We recently went on a road trip through the mostly miserable landscape of a goodly portion of the American west, and while you drive through those parts you see a lot of ranches, a lot of signs for ranches, and even some ranch houses.  These sightings fill me with dread and angst, and a miserable feeling of inevitability, much in the way I imagine that the sight of the people holes made the characters feel in "The Fault of Amiagara", a feeling of inescapable doom, a horrible magnetism drawing you to - in my case, the ranch house. For some reason I suffer the same obsession with my destiny that Winston Churchill or Luke Skywalker or other great men seem to feel, but whereas they are drawn to heroic achievement, I am convinced that it is my destiny to get stuck in uncomfortable situations where I do not belong and will fail miserably; like scout camps, ski trips, motor bikes, water sports, office work, construction work, and gyms. I have failed humiliatingly at all of them, and all of those failures seem to be marked with mental, physical, and existential discomfort. Thus ranches. I can not see myself at a ranch. People at ranches ride horses primarily, that seems; amongst those who enjoy water sports and motor bikes and gyms, to be the main thing about a ranch, the reason to go to a ranch and want to live at a ranch; to ride a horse, maybe feed it an apple or two, stroke its gigantic head and murmur something meaningful in a deep emotionally healing way that only the murderous brute and you understand. When I picture myself on a ranch, I picture myself falling off a tired old horse and being laughed at by a little boy in a cowboy hat and boots who's been riding horses his entire short life. I also picture cowboys who live in the saddle and shoot coyotes and sleep on rocks and swim in muddy water holes without a care in the world, and huge beasts with horns and bitey dogs and sagebrush and rocks.  It will be hot and the water will come from a quaint pump in the back, the bathroom will be an outhouse with wash rags instead of toilet paper, there will be dust on the dinner plates, the screen door will have holes and everyone sleeps on the floor of the bunkhouse or up a ladder in the hay ("the mice don't bother you none if you don't have food on you. You'll want to use the water pump, boy"). There's no internet but a super satellite TV screen dominates the main room with constant coverage of rodeos, nascar, motocross, pro wrestling, and country music videos.   I also picture remote locations close to the highway but far from the neighbors that are very similar to the locations of crime scenes that I have read extensively about, similar in every way to the "Before" picture of the crime scene that they always include. Before.

And after all that I can not escape the horrible feeling that it is my destiny to stay at a ranch, that somehow someone will talk me into it, or surprise me with a coupon on my birthday, or there will be some confusing series of events and necessities and cajoling friends and eager embrace-the-day type flashing happy eyes and pained sighing when I attempt to voice my legitimate concerns that will make no sense because the words; "it is your destiny" will be hammering over and over relentlessly in my head and I will find myself driving to the ranch house, taking the exit and driving down the gravelly road to the ranch house, and I will feel the tendrils of failure and defeat and miserable discomfort creeping up from the roiling pit in my stomach, and I will see this

Boring is Camouflage

Hagenart blog

I can't decide if I want to see the Book of Mormon Musical or not. That's actually a lie, I should say I can't decide how much I want to see it as compared to other things I could do. We thought about going when we were in New York a few months ago, but the ticket prices were Broadway ticket prices, New York prices that will leave someone from Utah feeling a little faint and sick to their stomach. They take prices very seriously in New York. They expect to be able to afford to live in Manhattan with what you pay them. 

You don't just get to stay in a not really all the way clean hotel and eat somewhat tasty sometimes food on the same island where they set Friends and practically every other TV show and all those Woody Allen movies and not expect to feel a bit of a sting when you see the bill. Sting is  a euphemism, of course. A sting is what someone like Bill Gates or Woody Allen might feel when they see a bill from even a middling-economy-roughing it-sort of New York deli (By deli I mean food cart). A person, like myself for instance, who still kind of barely has a job that is okay and can barely see a possibility of a frugal retirement on the horizon but who is better off than a majority of the country might feel something a little worse than a sting. More of a gasping, heart clutching reaction, adrenaline surging, looking for places to run, wondering if they'll catch you type of reaction. But I'm from Utah, and New York is a wonderful and exciting city to experience in TV shows and to read about online. 

So we didn't go to the Broadway show in New York. We didn't go when it came through Salt Lake either. They were at Park City prices by that time, which are much more reasonable than New York prices but desperately trying to attain the status of New York prices. 

We may never see it. I grew up Mormon in Utah, and as I indicated before all the digression, I feel ambivalent about seeing the show, not because it makes fun of Mormonism, which probably deserves worse than whatever they give it, but because it was written and created by the South Park guys, who are outsiders, very funny and talented outsiders, but still definitely outsiders. By outsiders I mean guys who did not grow up in Utah and did not grow up Mormon. If I sound like an ignorant hick by using the term "Outsiders", well, I am from Utah. They've done funny takes on Mormonism before, in Orgazmo, and the South Park Mormon episode. I've only seen the South Park episode in bits and pieces and once in mostly entirety under circumstances where I don't remember it, but what I've seen is funny, and would be beneficial for Mormons to see to get an accurate picture of how they and the missionaries are viewed by the world. For one thing, when most people think of Mormons, they think of missionaries; young guys in suits, at a very low level of educational and personal development, going door to door in an intrusive and annoying way, and worse, of a mindset that they've been told, commanded to annoy people by - the Creator of the universe. 

I think most Mormons would be astonished to learn that the missionaries are seen by outsiders as worse than telemarketers. 

And to outsiders, Orgazmo and the South Park episode - and the Book of Mormon musical - are probably just amusing takes on an entertainingly weird American cult. 

I found them amusing too, the bits I've seen, I just found little annoyances connected to the outsider thing, little things that have no doubt made the rounds on the Internet many times; the missionary in Orgazmo saying "Jesus and I love you," to his girlfriend, or even talking to his girlfriend at all while on his mission. Mormons don't call Jesus Jesus, they say "Christ." The Mormons in Orgazmo talk more like baptist evangelicals than middle America Utah Mormons. But that's the point, isn't it?  To an outsider, Mormonism sounds entertaining, so the individual Mormons must be too. They must be crazy Jesus camp types.  The truth about individual Mormons is somewhat disappointing, at least as far as my experience in Utah goes. The beliefs are wacky but the people are conservative, very normal, very boring. Normal to a fault. Ultra-normal. Eager to be seen as normal. Eager not to talk about the interesting bits, the wacky background, anything about Joseph Smith (the classic and archetypal non-Utah Mormon, also known as The First and the last interesting Mormon). 

Here's Utah Mormon life:  As a boy, I remember Mormon church services, -- the meetings where they supposedly discuss the crazy doctrine? - as boring, mind-numbingly boring, sensory deprivation level boring. My mother would give me scratch paper to draw on (Cheerios for smaller kids), to alleviate my suffering, and  but sometimes I would run out of paper, or she would forget to pack her purse with paper, and I would be left to my own desperate devices. Usually that would be a hymn book. The hymn books contained a list of approved hymns, numbered so that the ward choir director could announce the name of the hymn along with the number, so it could be easily and quickly found. But the hymn book also contained secret messages, written by highly connected members of the super intelligent society known as Teenage Boys. These secret messages would be instructions to turn to a certain hymn number for a secret message that would usually be an instruction to turn to another hymn number until after mounting excitement (the first time you went on one of these secret message scavenger hunts) you came to the final message, which would be an incredibly disappointing (the first time) message to go screw yourself, or a note to add "in bed" to all the previous hymn titles. After the first time, even knowing the ending, I would still sometimes resort to the secret message hymn book hunt during paperless services. The alternative was to actually look through my mother's triple combination (bible, Book of Mormon, D and C/Pearl of Great Price). The first two of those were mostly devoid of anything remotely interesting to a ten year old, except for the fantastic Arnold Friborg paintings in the BOM) but one Sunday while listlessly paging through the Pearl of Great Price, I made a fantastic discovery: an illustration, a mysterious hieroglyphic, which the notes described as The Planet Kolob!!  My ten year old self was overcome with astonishment. I'd never heard of the planet Kolob. They don't talk about that stuff in kids Sunday school classes, at least in Utah. They tell stories from the Bible and the Book of Mormon, they encourage you to say your prayers and obey your parents and go to church, but they don't talk about Kolob. I did not know why, back then. I asked my parents and my older siblings. I thought it was wild and strange and, unbelievably, for church stuff, interesting. A planet Kolob, where God lives and directs the universe?  Science fiction!  War in heaven!  Laser swords!  Spirit armies! The ultimate evil villain!  Nobody wanted to talk about it. They said it was sacred stuff, and it was not to be talked about. Later I realized they were just embarrassed by it.  Real scholars had translated the hieroglyphic, and it had nothing to do with Kolob. I don't even know if they still include it in newer prints of the PGP. Too interesting.  Ten year olds might pay attention in church. 

Now I've come to realize, in my advancing years, that Boring stuff is a Camouflage. Boring hides something. You put on camouflage when you don't want to be seen, when you're a gazelle and you don't want the tiger to see you, or you're a tiger and you don't want the gazelle to see you. History textbooks are boring because of all the exciting bits they want to hide.  And there is no place on earth that does boring like a Mormon church service (I hope). 

I've led us all (myself and my mother, anyway) on this high level scientific analysis of boring, and have completely left the original subject, the musical. To summarize, we'll probably end up seeing it, and I'm sure it will be an inaccurately entertaining depiction of the zany madcap world (I still wish, even as I'm approaching 50) of Mormonism. 

Next post, in the year 2016 perhaps: Ranches!

Joyless, Format-mandated illustration

I didn't include any pictures with the last few posts, which kind of violates the theme that I began the blog with, which was to publicize and distribute my art to the world. I felt and I still feel that this blog needs more focus, needs a theme and a point, as a literary critic might say. I toyed with the idea of doing book and movie reviews and doing a sort of themed illustration for each book or movie or TV show, just like these videos we used to watch in school where each episode would be about a particular book, and this guy would do an illustration while he talked about the book. I've never forgotten the one he did for the Forgotten Door, which is actually the only one I remember, so it might be the only one I actually saw in school, and maybe the only one the guy ever did, which is completely understandable if you think about how much of a hassle it was in school to review a book and read the report in class, even without being on camera, even without having to draw a picture from the story at the same time you're reading your book report. So it wouldn't surprise me if the guy gave up on his idea after one show, and it wouldn't surprise me if they couldn't find anyone else to do it. 

As it is a hassle. In addition, sticking to a rule like "there has to be a picture for each blog post," kind of kills the improvisational nature of a blog post, by constraining me from making a post if I don't have time to draw a whole new picture, because I never have time and I would never post at all if I kept to that rule. 

On the other hand, no rules at all kind of leaves everything floating in space and I don't really know where to begin or end the post or whether there's any point to posting at all. Okay, so there has to be a picture.  This is a picture I drew at a meeting at work. 

It was a while ago, but I drew the picture and therefore it is valid content for the blog. Most of the people in the drawing have moved to other companies, and in any case none of them even remotely look like themselves. I can not capture a likeness at all, and by not being able to do this I have avoided a lot of trouble

History of the English Studying Peoples

Well, this is sort of a sequel to the recent blog where I chose to illuminate the incredibles by writing a sequel. I just realized they should do this sort of thing in English classes, instead of the sitting around and talking about your feelings and impressions type thing. Creative writing!  You learn more by doing it yourself. And the students should perform their own writing and should perform other people's writing. In public. In local coffee shops or on the big grassy places colleges have, where people sit around and ponder the slow disintegration of their dreams. I'm kidding of course, since i would never have made English my major if they'd made us read in public. I'd have chosen something even more useless, which would be tricky. So tricky that it would have taken more mental effort to find that hypothetical degree than it would take to pass any course required by the English Major. I could begin a whole new field of humanities study, an entirely new Major, simply by requiring students, daring them, to find a degree more useless, more completely without any practical merit whatsoever, than an English degree. And I already know about Poly Sci.  And Pre-law and Pre-Med, and Personal Studies.  These are not contenders. We're looking for a very hypothetical entity.  There are very few people, I would guess, who would even understand how difficult this problem would be. It's almost a mathematical proof. The modern English Major is the culmination of years of organic selection pressure on universities and colleges, all seeking to produce graduates out of all caliber of students, from the few very smart to the many many very not-smart. These not-smart represent as much of a funding source as the very smart. And just as the myriad wonderful forms of life have evolved amazing techniques to compete for food with other life, so the universities have evolved Majors to lure dumb students and extract packets of government loans or parental savings in a minimum number of years. Thus the English Major.  When I sort of attended college, there was a choice of emphasis, for English Majors, between Creative Writing and British Literature. The more serious choice, the sober, responsible choice, of those two options, was British Literature; reading stories and poems written 100-1000 years ago. Not studying the history which was occurring all around the individuals who authored those stories and poems, just studying the completely fabricated stuff they dreamed up while they avoided any real work during, say, the Industrial Revolution. Try topping that, poly Sci Majors. At least Poly Sci, or pre med or pre law, are studying something real. The English degree with emphasis on British Literature was dedicated to studying Not Real things. And I did not choose that emphasis. It seemed a little too practical, too utilitarian. It reeked of job training. I chose Creative Writing, which is the purest distillation of the English Major. I've read about some abominable innovations in Creative Writing programs of late; courses designed to help students with the business side of writing; marketing; financial management, consumer trends! All part of a ghastly effort to help students with the practical side of creative writing. The well intentioned nimrods who design and implement such programs have lost sight of the true purpose of an English Degree with Creative Writing emphasis, which is to provide courses and a diploma to students who could not possibly make it through any course demanding real study, but who have as much money to spend as the smarties. Marketing? Financial Management? Bestselling Authors do not need such things. They will have ample time to ponder marketing while they wash dishes for Red Lobster, and as for financial management, the exciting hands on training provided by student loan defaults will drive home the knowledge and skills necessary for implementation of the financial management techniques most utilized by English Majors:  Top Ramen, Pabst, and the local Thrift Store. 

Couldn't find an appropriate illustration for discussion of college majors. Most people would put some kind of a graph, but I don't have a graph maker app. So I've included my Tribute to Thanksgiving. It's a dinner with pilgrims and Indians. I feel that the complete lack of any historical veridicy in the picture demonstrates my point nicely. If you don't see the connection, maybe you should have studied a little harder in that absurd lib Ed class you and your sciencey friends made fun of. 

Dear Pixar: I wrote your sequel and you can have it for a steal (no objectivism either)

Recently watched The Incredibles again. As I am a trained critic with an English degree (creative writing emphasis), I analyze every movie I see and every book I read using the cutting edge techniques I learned in college in 1989, and I was quite pleased with the insights I gleaned while watching the show again, so much so that I had thought to do a blog post blowing the lid on the whole Incredibles thing, but then I read the Wikipedia on the movie and it appears that many other people have already come up with the Ayn Rand comparison (don't listen to Brad Bird's lies, he's an Objectivist), which is not surprising as there are lots of English majors roaming the country, washing dishes and cleaning houses and teaching high school and analyzing whatever movies they can afford to watch. So I gave up on that post. 

But I also came up with my idea for a sequel to the movie which if it was ever made would undoubtedly be far superior to the actual sequel in production. 

If I were to do a sequel it would follow Jack jack, who would be in his early twenties and struggling at a small town college. He would be majoring in English of course, and having trouble taking it seriously. His family has been telling him stories of the glory days all his life, about fighting syndrome and other villains on the island, about the giant killer robots and of course about mom and dad's earlier glory days, before his brother and sister were born. It's twenty years after the events of the first movie. His parents are in their late sixties. His dad has health problems; he's too heavy at his age. Violet is married with several children, his brother Dash is a lawyer.  He's never actually seen anyone in his family use any super power. And they've told him all about the wild powers he has, but he's slowly realized that he's  never been able to do anything like the things in their stories.  He used to think he remembered doing those things, but it's dawned on him that he might just be remembering their stories. Strangely, he's talked to family friends who also seem to remember his powers. He thinks he has secret mental problems that cause him trouble, and he's tortured that his family and friends might find out that he's somehow lost his powers and stop treating him as a special person. What's worse, his parents often talk about how important will power and belief are to wielding super powers, and he feels guilt and shame for his failure, that he has some moral failing that prevents him from wielding his super powers. 

In the midst of this troubling time, a friend wins airline tickets in a contest, and Jack Jack goes to Hawaii with his friend. While there, he happens upon a tourist brochure describing a small island that looks uncannily like the pictures his father has shown him of Syndrome's island. Jack Jack and his friend take a ferry to the island, and there at the dock, they meet Syndrome, or at least a man who looks just like him, employed as a mechanic by the ferry line. They engage him in conversation, and to Jack Jack's astonishment, he knows the family. He appeared in an episode of their one season TV series, where they played a super hero family. Syndrome, or Buddy as his friends call him, takes them home for dinner, and they meet his wife Mira, who is Mirage, and their kids, a girl and a boy. There appears to be a strange tension between Buddy and Mira at dinner, as they tell Jack Jack about the episode filmed on the island. Mira owns a pub/restaurant which she's  filled with memorabilia from the time, with framed screenshots from the show and even props. The episode never aired and the series was canceled, so the mementos in the bar are worthless. It dawns on Jack Jack that his parents might be demented, and that no one in the family ever had super powers. It later comes out, after Mira hysterically intervenes in a short lived romance between Jack Jack and Buddy's daughter, whose name is Janet Jean and goes by "JJ", That Jack Jack's father had an affair with Mira during the filming on the island. After discovering the infidelity, Helen Parr refused to appear in the episode, which was eventually scrapped, resulting in the end of the family's acting career after the cancellation. JJ, Mira says between sobs, is the love child of Bob Parr. Buddy doesn't know. Horrified at dating his sister, Jack Jack leaves the island. The final scenes are a Godfather type fugue, with scenes of Jack Jack returning to his parents house, confronting his father, who nods sadly, and visiting his mother, who sits on the back porch of the house, staring creepily at a metal sculpture in the backyard, a sculpture of the killer robot from the first movie. These scenes alternate with Buddy in his backyard, soldering something with a blowtorch.  As Jack Jack greets his mother, we see JJ and her brother at a bedroom window, watching their father. Then Jack Jack telling his mother he's dropping out of school.  She nods sadly, and says "never forget you're a special person."  These words are spoken off camera, as the scene switches to JJ and her brother looking out the window, perspective changed so that we can't see what they're seeing, only flashes like welding sparks, lighting their faces. After the word "special", a sudden flash of blue white light illuminates them. They don't flinch, they've seen it many times before.  Their eyes shine with the light for one creepy moment, then the final credits roll. 

Holy cow, I get chills every time I visualize that last scene!  I can't believe they're going to make some typical Hollywood crap, when they could be doing this sequel and they'd barely have to pay me anything at all for it (I'm a terrible negotiator. I tend to giggle when I lie). 

I might try to do a picture of the last scene, if I can do it justice. But probably not due to the time thing