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