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