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

Guest artist

I'm going to break with a sort of tradition that I've adhered to in this blog and in my life in general, which is to never promote or talk about and most certainly to never display or post artwork by someone other than myself.  It's a sort of rule, you see. I made the rule for several reasons:  if I pretend there are not millions of artists better than myself by basically refusing to acknowledge or even look at their work, I can continue to assess my pictures with that totally uncritical love that children and mediocre art need to live and thrive. 

The other reason is more complicated and philosophical and esthetically based:  I have created a sort of comic book world in these posts, an alternate universe where all visual depictions are in the awkward cartoonish form of the protagonist's childlike vision. A photo or professionally done drawing or even mildly competent artwork would shatter the spell, breaking the narrative and jarring the reader with a hackneyed violence that no writer with true passion for the craft could ever stomach. 

But to be perfectly honest, since the reader described in the explication of the second reason is undoubtedly in an overwhelming majority of site visits simply a temporally progressed version of the writer - meaning myself alone, re-reading my own post, the second reason for the rule could be truthfully said to be just a pompous and verbose re-hash of the first reason, which has already been exposed as shallow and contemptible. 

In any case, the other artist I'm posting is my own father. Since we share the same last name, his work still qualifies as "hagenart."  And genetically we are 50% identical, so what's the difference?  (Hint: it's the same number as the mathematical similarity, see above). 

I recently scanned several sketches from my father's notebooks. I don't know if he meant them to ever be seen, or had in the manner of our family some kind of imagined scenario for how or who or when he wanted them to be seen or discovered in the rubble by the archaeologists of the far future digging through the dirt of the titanic Yellowstone eruption that will annihilate the western United States most likely at the very moment when we've got self driving cars and surgically implanted iPhones and genetically engineered Google glass skulls, but I got them and I scanned them and this one's my favorite:

It's an owl reading the Book of Mormon. My father was devout. I don't know if he liked the owl after he drew it. The owl does not to me look as if he is enthralled by what he is reading, so I wonder if my father disliked the picture and did not use it for whatever he had intended. I can't even imagine. He was delightfully half-hearted with many of the unpleasant standards that the community he grew up in demanded of him, and all the time seemed genuinely disappointed in his own free inclinations. I never knew if he was putting everyone on.  He was as gentle as a dove with the feelings of his loved ones, even myself, his undoubtedly most disappointing son. 

I intend to color in this picture and all the others I scanned, it's a basic pleasure of children and infantile men, to add to a picture that someone else has already done the heavy lifting on, but instead of crayons I'm planning to use the photo processing software that eliminates much of that drudgery of colorization which is the last bastion of penance left to the mediocre doodlers.