Another New Direction for Science!

I have often waxed rhapsodic on the magic of books, but only to close relatives or my own offspring. I myself am a reader who would never advise other people to read, because even in a democracy like the US, where an uneducated electorate can take your money and wreak havoc, I would prefer to always feel like the smartest person in the room.  And for that reason I don't like children's books about books where characters emerge from the books, emitting magic sparkles and preparing to fill someone with wonder. 

Well actually that's not the reason. I find them vapid and saccharine. That's the reason.   And I believe they're useless as far as encouraging people to read. 

So what are we to make of this picture of a little book town?  

Drawn by someone who doesn't like those kind of pictures?  I honestly don't know. I'm almost fifty and I still can't explain myself. Pathological immaturity and laziness, but maybe I'm flattering myself. There may have been a book or two sitting inside the toy train track circle, that inspired me with the notion to draw a little book town. I do remember having a vague idea for some kind of neat representation of book people coming out of the books, little letter people with serif hands and bow ties, or perhaps the characters of every book, magically come alive and on whimsical foray beyond the edge of their flat papery home.   They would have sparkly dust floating around them to signify they were magic, and would speak in rhyme. 

I'd like to say I didn't do that because it's an overdone idea that other people, many other people, had already beaten to death, over and over again, in countless children's books. But it appears that I started to do it in this picture and then gave up for reasons of laziness, leaving the little people without sparkles or indication of the wonders of reading. They're just little figures that could possibly be descendants of silverfish, completely illiterate, and slowly devouring the pages of the gigantic books they shelter in, caring no more for the inky gibberish that appears on their food than we would for the stems and leaves that we wash off our fruits and veggies before we eat.  Perhaps they would enjoy and prefer the rare blank pages as we enjoy a seedless watermelon, delicious food that can be savored without annoyance.   

And it appears I did try the same thing again a week or so later on another sketchbook page:

I'm breaking a rule, my own rule, to include this second picture in the same post, but I don't like this second picture and it doesn't deserve its own post. I honestly don't know why I include pictures in the posts at all, if only to continually remind my family that I wanted to be an artist, that they might share my sense of failure. This second picture features the magic of words, or letters at least, coming to whimsical life to bring a little magic to our sad lives.  I usually critique my own pictures with the ferocity of a doting grandparent on their only grandchild, but I can barely stand to look at this one, and it has forced me to re-appraise the meandering unfocused nature of this project.  If I were a young man again, 30 years old and living in my parents basement without a job or a care in the world, I could well believe that a yearlong project to produce two random doodles a week might indeed yield a plethora of astounding art, and the unfocused and free range thinking would allow my sexually repressed and angry young brain to conceive revolutionary artistic themes, drawing upon intuition and passion, not the cold reason of my dry, jaded middle age. Yes, the artistic time of my life has passed. Like my father before me I have a house and family and a job that I'm ashamed to tell my children about, and see modern art as a huge scam and literature as a tired, dull magic trick. I have completely lost that delightful cluelessness and ignorance that make art possible. I view movies as an irritated skeptic, like Siskel and Ebert with a painful hernia and an inflamed prostate, unable give a thumbs up to anything longer than fifteen minutes. I roll my eyes at the opening credits, and I find every ending is either lazy or forced. 

And so I have decided to change the entire direction of this project: A scientific study of my life, where it went shatteringly wrong and why, told in graphic form. This will not be a graphic novel. I have grown weary of the recent spate of graphic novel memoirs. This will not be a story to warm the heart and inspire. I envision a cold, dispassionate dissection of my youth, a treatise, absent of the rich, painfully honest detail that the Norwegian guy filled his autobiography with. Only a Scandinavian would do that.  They watch shows about trains in Norway. Not Thomas the Train, not stories about people riding a train. Just a video of a train going on its track for hours. Not even funny videos of commuters fighting as the doors close, or neat speeded up shots of people going in and out of the station like koyanaskatsi. 

 I've covered the years between my work at the radio station and family life, and the final collapse of my artistic pretensions, in the sklogs. I've graphically covered my inner world from mid twenties to the radio station, the aftermath of my college failure, the life chapter I've entitled "Flight into Delusion", in the ballpoint illustrations that I later sold at local festivals. Now for the science. Beginning with college, before I gave up on being a writer. This won't be a chronologically-ordered study. We'll go back and forth, like pulp fiction or Doctor who. We'll begin next week, after I've prepared some graphics about my college years. This will be statistically intensive, but I'm assuming anyone reading this has read their prerequisites

Requires 2D Glasses- Har har that's a good one!

I have a strange fetish for two dimensional pictures that I believe to be the result of artistic childishness; I can't draw convincing three dimensional people or objects, and instead of pushing myself to learn perspective and proportions I have allowed myself to regress back to my two dimensional world in everything I draw.  This failing turned fetish has biased my preferences for any art or design, and I have turned away from the current 3D mania in movies and video games. I want everything on the surface, like old-school Nintendo, and the first person shooters tend to fill me with existential dread. If I was given a choice of virtual reality afterlives, I'd go for the 2D, like an eternal webpage with comics. And I draw pictures like this one, flat with the whole story on the surface. 

One interesting result is that people think I'm drawing abstract art, when I never do. Abstract art is based upon all kinds of beneath the surface meanings, but I never put anything beneath the surface.  Not abstract. No themes or symbolism. For this one I was drawing a port, with two dimensional buildings and little boats in it. The shapes further out are are plants growing on islands. Obviously an art major might be able to sleuth out some subconscious meanings in the picture, but really, it's a port with little ships in an alien, two dimensional world.  

If I suddenly became a famous abstract artist and sold pictures for loads of money, and people asked me what a picture meant, I might not say the same thing. I might say it the first time someone asked me, but if they seemed disappointed or if I felt embarrassed, I might say something like I was "toying with shapes". Then I might read critical reviews referring to "exploration of organic forms" or something very cool like that, and I might prefer to say that instead of "little alien ships". I might start referring to "pieces" instead of "drawings".   

I just realized that there was a Kurt Vonnegut book, "Bluebeard", where the protagonist, an abstract artist, says about the same thing; that he has silly stories in mind when he does his pieces. I'm a little disappointed to be imitating his idea, but I think my backstories for my pictures are more embarrassing.  His were about a deer or something. And I do not claim to do or try to do abstract drawings. I was just saying that I might change my tune if I became rich, which is a completely different theme than Vonnegut was pursuing. 

This picture would be much better in color too. That would be another failing I have; letting ultimate intent skew current method. I drew the picture with the idea at the back of my mind that it would be colored, and so drew a less interesting, un-colored picture instead of an intended black and white celebration of its own monochromatic nature sort of picture, like ansel Adams photos. I also do the opposite; I add colors to a picture, in line with earlier intent, that actually mar the black and white picture, because it didn't need any colors and was drawn to be without colors, by myself, because I forgot about the colors halfway through the picture and drew it to be black and white. The moral of the story is don't add color unless it needs color, but you'll never know if it needs color unless you're a real artist, so the moral of the story is I never know and neither by the laws of probability will you the reader because my mother is not an artist either. 

I may use computer technology to color the picture later, using the magic wand and the button with the sloshing paint bucket, but for some reason, probably age-related, a drawing task that I wouldn't mind spending two hours doing by hand seems almost unbearably difficult if it would take more than five minutes on the computer. 

My Creative Output is an Enigma wrapped in a Mystery Containing an Imaginary Comic Book

I didn't continue the story of Doctor Elephante in the sketchbook. I continued the story in idea mode, meaning in my head, for several days after. And in my head the story got so incredibly good that I could hardly think of anything else. I became completely involved in the story as a viewer, and could hardly wait to see what would happen next. At the same time as a creator I became convinced that I had a monster hit on my hands, a story that could possibly be the best selling comic book of all time, and a hit movie and a tv series and an Oscar winner that might go down in history as comparable to the works of Shakespeare and Michelangelo and Bach as one of the supreme achievements of the human mind. My expectations as a viewer soared into the stratosphere at the same time as the pressure to deliver began to inhibit the playful creativity that I had begun the imaginary story with. It stopped being fun, and turned into a chore. I began to just grind out the illusionary episodes like an indifferent machine, without feeling any connection to the character or the audience which was also an imaginary character. Then finally, as a viewer, I gave one of the installments a negative review.  As a creator my world came crashing down around me, and I resigned from the show (it was no longer a comic book at that point).  Unfortunately the panels and scripts and completed episodes were all in my head, in idea mode, so when I stopped writing and inking and publishing the comic book and adapting and directing and filming and starring in the series about 72 hours after the original doodles, it all sorted of faded away and I have nothing real to show for all that effort but the memories - which are all sort of fading away too.   Anyway, heat death of the universe, water under the bridge. 

Then we went on a road trip to Tucson and I drew a picture of our motel room:

I had some problems with the layout of the room in this picture due to the un-calibrated nature of my representative drawing style, meaning I can't do proportions and don't know how real artists do them. They may use a ruler or something. Also, I tend to adopt a circular scanning technique wherein I draw one side of a doorway and draw along down in a clockwise motion of my field of view, drawing the stuff nearer the doorway, down to my own feet, then moving up along the left side and up to the left  side of the doorway - which, mysteriously - did not now line up with the right, not even close, the left side bottom began at a spot just below the top of the door frame. This left a blank void in the middle of the room, which I filled with a farewell panel from the Doctor Elephante comic.  I then simply completed the left side of the door in space, so to speak, leaving the door and frame seeming to stand about ten feet inside the room, past the entrance area. Looking at the picture now, I am astonished with how natural and realistic and cozy the room looks with this fantastic door standing confidently in the center of it. The phantom doorway lends an easy and delightful flow to the layout to the room that motel designers and architects should pay close attention to, and the yawning chasm of nothingness through which my financially and critically triumphant comic book from an alternate universe makes its enigmatic appearance doesn't seem to mar the aesthetic of the room as severely as I'd originally feared

Diffident Continuation of Previous Story

The story of Doctor Elephante

Continuing the development of the character introduced in the previous doodle:

Revisiting this origin story, I have to confess that it seems to me to display several fundamental weaknesses of myself as a comic book writer. For one thing, who is this person in the first panel? I mean, to start with, what's his name?  Even Stan Lee took some time before the Origin Event of his characters, to show them as normal humans in a normal life. I personally found these introductory sequences almost completely unbearable to wade through, but it doesn't mean they didn't help a little to ground spidey or Mr Fantastic in a kind of boring, this-is-your-goodguy-like-him-and-get-to-the-pow-pow, kind of way. At the bare minimum, a name and occupation, and at least one adjective having somewhat of a relation to personality should preface the explosive origin event. 

So, reviewing this comic, I would say this writer has no patience and is unwilling to put much work into his craft. And does not possess the ability to visually tell a story. The best part of this panel, in my opinion, has got to be my idea for the two ton elephant pants. If I had continued the comic, I would have dedicated it to the development of this idea. How does he make the two ton pants?  How does he walk in them?  What events transpire, in his post-origin-event experience, to set him on the path to conceiving and devising and creating the two ton pants?

But alas, we will never know. These doodles are not blueprints of what will be, but merely shadows of what might have been about to be.  They offer a snapshot of an unproductive mind, in continual ferment, with no progress, no habitable structures. A roiling mob of ideas with no will to organized government or culture

The man in the mirror is a brutally honest doodle

I wanted this entry to continue the gritty inside story of the development of a computer game, SubOrban, which I basically created in real time during my previous post, but I haven't done any real work on it besides the orb puns and a pretty listless bit of research into the orb imaging abilities of the drawing apps on my phone. Very negative downer experience. I also haven't submitted the concept to Marketing, to be rent into pieces. Or is that rended to pieces?  Or maybe de-rendered to pieces. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm berry excited about SubOrban, the possibilities and money and all that. And even more excited about the possible book I could weave together out of the blog entries, a sort of "Soul of a New Machine" type novel. 

But I don't have any material yet. And I do have another sketchbook entry to post, as in the name and while point of this blog. 

This actually might be a close number two to my picture from two posts ago, of myself running with the branch, that I said might be the magnum opus of my later life. I think this one will be the one most often mentioned with that picture, as belonging to the same artistic period. A few critics or some family member or maybe my mother will say that this is their favorite, just to be different and surprising. It will be like the empire strikes back to Star Wars. 

What does the picture mean?  I'll leave that for future generations of miserably bored people to decide, but it seems to follow the main theme of the sketchbook so far: Ongoing failure, a continued lack of progress on both fronts, or prongs, of my overall yearly goal, which is basically a low key college years worth of study of computers and literature. I set the goals with an academic theme in mind because my creative doodling juices seem to be most stimulated when I have other, more important things to do. I can only truly focus on any task in a desperate attempt to mentally fend off some looming real responsibility, and school has always, since my wasted youth, a powerful symbol of What I Should Be Doing. 

Back to the picture, which seems to depict a socially awkward and emotionally remote meeting between myself, Santa Claus, and an elf. The two diminutive figures at our feet could be interpreted as children in costume or large action figures, or both one and the other. One is my homage to Doctor Octopus, my favorite comic character next to doctor doom and the fantastic four (the hulk died in me with the avengers movie).  The other, well, is a new character that I've created myself; Senor Elephante. I've actually created an origin story for this character that I'm not very happy with but which will have to do for now.   

Amazing insight!  It just occurred to me that the diminutive figures represent my lost childhood (Doctor octopus) and future wasted effort (Senor Elephante). In that light, Santa, who seems in the picture to have that mental illness where people hug themselves, is gazing in sad question at me, while I look away, avoiding eye contact, looking somewhat ruefully at my mental progeny (get it?) while the elf comments sarcastically on my stomach fat. 

I just realized two things; Santa is awkwardly holding a bag over his shoulder, not mentally ill at all, and the elf has no lower body. He's apparently suspended in mid air or the picture is incomplete. And he and the picture will never be completed; the artist is distracted (willfully?) by the tiny fruits of his imagination, while his generous, empathetic side (comforting Santa) is avoided and his sober, critical side (sarcastic hovering elf), is left with his lower half, including supporting limbs and procreative organs, unfinished and discarded. Reeling from powerful self assessment. Must go doodle this feeling away immediately

Orb-orb's Orb of Fate rotates on Orb Wide Web search

I can't keep beginning every entry with the words "this week's picture", so each week I have to think up some pointless comment to begin with before I inevitably refer to "this week's picture."  So I'm not going to say that at all. We'll just assume there's a picture I'm talking about unless I make the special disclaimer at the very beginning; "I have no picture to share."  

More robots, I know. These are actually my vision of metallic life forms that will someday proliferate through the solar system if I have any say in the matter. They live on tiny worlds that have minimal gravity. They stick on the worlds through electromagnetism. The robots are little orbs, but they can upgrade by purchasing arms and tractor legs and additional spherical body sections. Actually I've created a video game, essentially. Orb-land. Or Orb-ball. Those names won't work. There's no land in the game except on the big orbs, so Orb-land makes no sense. And Orb-ball is redundant. 

I'll have to have the hagenart marketing department research whether this idea has been done yet. Orbiverse. SubOrban. Yes!

I'll keep thinking, but marketing will want to do the name.  My job is the product, and I'm practically finished with design right now. I've really got the Orb rotating! And I have the feeling that the delightfully synonymic relationship of orb and ball and world will provide me with an almost endless river of jokes - a whole new Orb of them! - with which to delight the reader and myself. 

Of course marketing will try their best to find that someone else has already done it, just as development will try our best to replace 'ball' with 'orb' in as many amusing ways as we can before passing the orb to production, leaving them with whatever scraps didn't pass muster in the initial humor mining. 

Back to the picture, which the more I think of it pretty neatly encapsulates the spirit and idea and metastructure of the game so well that production will have a remarkably easy time extracting some fantastic gameplay out of, it's just basically fill in the blanks with simple Java or ruby rails or whatever the coding drones call it. Basically I think we've got it, once marketing sells the idea for enough to hire a production department, and of course pay their own wages as well.  And of course those wages might encourage them to evaluate the ideas rotating  out of development (psych!) with maybe a touch more effort than it takes to do a couple of Google searches. But I admit that marketing is outside my orb of expertise, so I don't want to tell them how to do their job. Yes!  I'm really on an orbit today!

On a more serious note, I attempted to depict the orientation of robot figures in this picture as rotating from directly under the POV at the bottom of the picture to 90 degrees up at the top of the picture, so as to demonstrate the spherical nature of the surface they're on. I failed in this, just as I failed to find a synonym of spherical that uses the root 'orb''. Have I already used up the 'orb' mine?  Already feeling the let-down that usually waits until after the marketing report. Between the orb and the reality falls the shadow

Betrayal of the Limb

I've already fallen behind on the weekly art journal that I'd resolved to do this year, for various reasons, all tied to defects in my personality and the outrageous tyranny of full time work, but it doesn't matter, because I've already drawn the major opus of my later life, like the French guys water lilies. What a load of free time he must have had.  

You educated people know who I'm talking about!  Please tell me, I can't remember his name, and I want to toss it to the philistines like emotionally hurtful bread crumbs. 

I took considerably less time to draw my major opus, and it shows, but I believe it encapsulates these final years of my earthly existence fairly well. 

Unlike the lazy surrealist doodles that have in the past and will continue in the future to waste the time of any stray viewers of this blog, this drawing actually depicts a real life event that has haunted my suburban existence: I broke my neighbors tree, on accident. I was attempting to bond with the little kids that wait for the school bus along with my kid, and one of them asked me to pull on the snow covered branch of this aspen tree, in order that the snow would fall on them in a freezing shower and they would be amused thereby.  I demurred, as the tree was on the front yard property and right by the front window of someone's house. The kids are always playing around in the yard while they wait for the bus, but as I am a grownup it doesn't seem right to me to walk onto their yard from the sidewalk. The kid insisted that the owners of the house have told them that it's okay to play in the yard, and as her will is implacably strong and mine is barely perceptible at all I pulled on the branch and it broke off the tree and fell to the ground before me.  "Oh they're gonna be mad," the kid said, and they all ran to the bus which had conveniently pulled up at that moment, leaving me alone by the broken limb, gazing furtively at the front Windows of the house. The picture depicts my headlong rush up the street, conveying the huge piece of evidence to my own back yard where it could be hidden. I had resolved to approach the neighbor at a more reasonable time of day to apologize for the branch, but I have never done so.  It seems aggressively intrusive to me to knock on someone's door for anything but a medical emergency. Better to just wait for an opportune time, when both of us happen to be outside and walking near, and have no urgent business to attend to, to mention the tree and take the opportunity to say how sorry I was...and if all parties happen to grow old and pass away before that meeting ever happens so the better.  And if there's an afterlife wherein social interaction is some kind of requirement and past wrongs are expected to be righted then I will be happy under those circumstances, where time would expected to be in extremely plentiful supply, to bring the matter up.