I have added another page to the ongoing story of the fairy folk of the Hidden Kingdom of Tellosia. I will append it here to the whole of Chapter Two as it exists so far;
So, there you have it. What will happen next? Will Zam be killed? Will the Mouse rescue her? Will Captain Pomegranate fly off into the sunset? I tell you what, I really wish I knew.
Filed under artwork, comic book heroes, fairies, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink, Uncategorized
Filed under art criticism, artwork, humor, insight, Paffooney, philosophy, surrealism, Uncategorized
Last night brought second-hand victories to Mickeyworld. I am definitely NOT a Republican, but the Indiana Primary results put a smile on my face. Not, of course, because the Orangutan Man with a pocket-full of wall plans won and will probably be the GOP nominee. Rather, because the evil space lizard who wants to put an end to everything good that comes from government finally dropped out of the race for President. Yes, Ted Cruz has put his world domination ambitions on hold until some future election or military or political coup. And Trump against any candidate the Democrats put forward will probably lose… unless Americans all have lobotomies before November.
The NHL playoff game last night also yielded good news. The St. Louis Blues, after having beaten last year’s Stanley Cup champion, beat the Dallas Stars 6 goals to 1 in the third game of round two. They totally dominated the division champions and took the lead in the series in a way that makes it seem that going to roll over them.
I am certainly not fool enough to imagine the good times will last. Good things happen one day, only to evaporate into nothingness the next. But I tend to believe that I have every right to enjoy the good things while they happen. Boo-hoos for tomorrow. Yippee-kai-yays for today.
Filed under Celebration, hockey, humor, Paffooney, politics, Uncategorized
This is a place I explore in cartoons and daydreams. It is a little town known as Animal Town for fairly obvious reasons. It is populated by silly anthropomorphic animals who wear clothes and keep naked people as pets.
Animal Town is one of the all-time silliest places to visit in the cartoon dreamland of Fantastica.
Mandy Panda and little brother Dandy are my constant companions and guides when I tour the dangerous streets of wild Animal Town. In my cartoons, Mandy is an immigrant from the Pandalore Islands. She is also the cartoon version of my wife.
Three of the Town’s most important head monkeys.
It was Mandy who introduced me to the government officials who run Animal Town. Judge Moosewinkle is the head of the Animal Town court system. He is a hanging judge, so I am very careful about littering and loitering when I am in town.
Constable Geoffrey Giraffe does all the arresting and police work. He used to work in a toy store, but quit his job there when he couldn’t get them to stop writing the R backwards on all their signs. Grammar infractions annoy him more than any other crime.
Linus the Kitten-Hearted is the mayor of Animal Town. They wanted to crown him as king, but he always says that’s only for when he’s in the jungle. In town he prefers to be a democratically elected leader. Of course, if you refuse to vote for him, he might eat you.
Most of my dreams in Animal Town are about the school there.
Yes, this is a yearbook picture from Animal Town Elementary School.
Miss Ancient’s Class of 5th graders is usually rather rowdy and difficult. You may have noticed there is a bare bear in the old buzzard’s class. The fact is, the bears in Animal Town are all naturists and refuse to wear clothes. This disturbs poor Miss
Ancient greatly, and it is therefore a real godsend that a fig leaf just happened to be drifting down through the air at the time this picture was made. Bobby Bare is not shy, but some things are better not put into a cartoon.
Yes, this is another yearbook picture. And I am in it twice, since Mr. Reluctant Rabbit is also me.
As a visitor to Animal Town, Cissy Bare took me to Mr. Rabbit’s class as her pet for show and tell. She is also a bare bear, and she also benefited from a passing leaf at picture time. You may notice students putting rabbit ears behind each other’s heads in pictures… something that human children do too in real life. But when I study this picture, I can’t help but think that maybe Mr. Rabbit started it. Now, Animal Town is located in Fantastica, a part of the Dreamlands. So that sort of explains how I ended up in school naked. My dreams are like that. You are in school in the middle of lessons before you realize that haven’t got a single stitch of clothing on.
When I am inevitably charged with public indecency for being in school naked, I can turn to Animal Town lawyer Woolbinkle Moosewinkle. He is totally incompetent and not very bright, but unlike most of the animals, he is friendly and on my side. Spot Firedog is a Dalmatian who knows how to use a newspaper. He is a reporter, publisher, and all-around good dog. He wrote an expose on me being naked in the Animal Town Elementary school.
Big Bull Beefalo runs the local hamburger emporium, which might seem like collusion to cannabalism, but Bull is a very gentle and very large soul. He is himself a vegetarian, but he is a gifted fry cook and chef. I can go to his restaurant when I get out of jail, though hopefully not as food.
So, Animal Town is a very different kind of place. It is the result of dreams and goofiness and uncontrolled spurts of cartoonist creativity. It is a cartoon sort of place where spontaneous and random humor happens.
Filed under cartoons, cartoony Paffooney, characters, comic strips, humor, Paffooney, pen and ink, Uncategorized
Okay, so on the synesthesia tests I didn’t score as a synesthete on the music/color test. But I was extremely synesthetic on the tests for color/months/days of the week. I was a little over the mark on letter/number/colors synesthesia too, but it was more a problem with manipulating the color-selector device when I don’t have a mouse to use on my laptop. The test for music did not test the way I see colors with music. They wanted me to respond to what color each individual note seemed to be, and that isn’t even close to the way I experience it. For me, the perfect description of how synesthesia works for me is Bach’s Tocata and Fugue in D minor as it is depicted in Fantasia.
I was shocked when I first saw it. The colors are wrong for this piece, but the visual experience is almost exactly how I experience music, especially wordless instrumental music. The only problem with this piece is that the overall color schemes are wrong. But this comes about because every synesthete sees the colors differently. And I have no doubt that at least one of the artists who created this had synesthesia. If there were more reds, yellows, and magenta in the opening and more indigo contrasted with silver later, this interpretation would be perfect.
Music synesthetically works in two directions for me. The picture above, called The Wings of Imagination, makes me think of La Mer by Claude Debussy.
If you listen to the piece, don’t look at the YouTube illustration, look at my picture if you want to see the music the way I do. The following song, Don’t Worry, Be Happy, is a multicolored song that I can best express with the colors in the picture I call Rainbow Peacock.
The full range of primary colors together in one picture, or one song, always means completeness, fullness, and happiness to me. If there is absence of one or more of the basic colors from the color wheel, the mood and emotion present in the song or picture is altered to something other than happiness. The Firebird Suite by Igor Stravinsky goes from the indigo and navy blue of fear and confusion to instances of angry red and feverish orange. It would look something like this in the theater of my imagination;
And one of my favorite instrumental pieces of all times, Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun by Claude Debussy, is full of melancholy and sexual tension, deeply felt vibrations in the depths of my stomach, and would look like my picture Sleeping Beauty with its teal and blue melancholia juxtaposed with candle-lit yellows and wood brown mixed feelings of joy and anxiety.
Now, if you have waded through all of this goofy color-and-music analysis from a source whose sanity is questionable at best, you probably have no earthly idea what any of it has to do with anything. But if you have that aha!-moment and see it all clearly too, then I suspect you probably are a synesthete too. Poor you. It is not a treatable condition. But it is also not a burden. Learn to enjoy it. It resonates in your very soul.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life, Uncategorized
This link will help you understand Synesthesia
Yes, Mondays are blue. Specifically French blue. Every day of the week has its own color. Sunday is golden yellow, Tuesday is a yellow-ochre, Wednesday is indigo blue and sometimes changes to blue violet, Thursday is burnt orange, and Friday is solid wood brown, and of course Saturday is rich pure red while Mondays are not just any blue… they are French blue. I learned the names of these colors from being a painter and using oil paints. I experience these colors every week and they help me maintain the calendar in my stupid old head. I began to realize when I first heard about the colors of the wind in the Disney movie Pocahontas that there was something to this everyday thing, something different in the way I see the world. I have in the last few years learned that this condition has a name. It is called synesthesia.
It has been suggested to me by more than a few people that I don’t really perceive the world the same way “normal people do”. When I was growing up, and going to school, I never had trouble remembering to capitalize the first word in a sentence. I did however, have a great deal of difficulty with capital letters on nouns. Looking back on that difficulty now, I can say without a doubt that I was having trouble not because I didn’t know the difference between proper nouns and common nouns. It was because things like the word “dog” or “chair” had to begin with the right color. Dogs are blue when you are talking about the color of the letters in the word. But small “d” is blue-green, not true blue. It doesn’t fit as well as the dark blue capital “D”. And chairs are orange-red when you write them down, while the small “c” appears light green by itself.
Sundays are Sun-days, and that’s why they are golden yellow.
I am told that most synesthetes are taken by surprise when they learn that they are seeing things differently than other people do. I certainly was. I always got funny looks whenever I described Thursdays as orange, or the month of November as sky blue. My classmates in 4th grade thought I was nuts… of course, it wasn’t just for the orange Thursdays thing. I was not a normal kid in any real sense of the word. I always suspected that if I could look at the world through other people’s eyes, I would probably see the color green as what I called red, or that glowing halo that surrounded things when organ music played in the Methodist church would no longer be there. But once I learned how synesthesia works I knew it was true. The visual part of the brain can be scanned to show activity, and lights up on the scanner as if the brain is seeing bright colors when Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is being played while the subject of the scan is actually blindfolded. I am told that synesthesia is more common in left-handed girls. My daughter, the Princess, tells me that she also sees color on printed numbers and letters. She is left handed and also gifted at drawing. I suspect she inherited the synesthesia from me.
Synesthesia probably explains what this nonsense is all about.
Now, I acknowledge the fact that my synesthesia is self-diagnosed and not proven by any of the methods the articles I have read about the condition talked about. But my personal experiences always seem to fall in line with descriptions of letter/number/color combinations and music/color combinations that I have read about. And if I do have it, it is not the same as any of my six incurable diseases. It is not a bad condition to have. In an artistic sense, it might actually be a good thing. I could use some good for a change. Good doesn’t usually come from weirdness… not my weirdness, anyway. (Oh, and capital “G” is lime green… as is the word Goodness).
My first novel-length piece of writing was attempted in college. I finished it in four years. It was a pirate tale about a young man, a pirate named Graff the Changeling. You see him in this illustration I created in 1980 with his two young sons, Rene and Emery. Because their mother was a fairy, the boys have pointed ears and horns. It was an attempt at serious fantasy adventure fiction that was so awful, it became a comedy before it was through. I called it The Graff Tales, and I still have it. But I promise you, I will never, ever try to publish the horrible thing. My sisters served as my beta readers for this story. They both liked the oral stories I told, and they eagerly awaited something like they remembered from our shared childhood. They both were a bit disappointed by my first prose attempt. There was a knight called Sir Rosewall in the story. He was a hapless knighted fool who lived in poverty and swore to reclaim his honor with great deeds, but as he goes to sea as a kidnapped sailor, all he manages to do is fall down a lot and bump his large head frequently. In the first scene when he enters the story, long about chapter four, he exits a cottage and has to punt a piglet to get out without falling down. This pig-punting thing was repeated more than once with this character. My sisters joked that the “pig-in-the-doorway” motif would be my lasting contribution to literature. Fortunately for me, it was not. I am probably the only one who even remembers there was such a novel.
But my biggest failing with writing and storytelling was always that I could be too creative. The story featured a flying pirate ship that was raised from the bottom of the ocean by fairy magic. The crew were re-animated skeletons. The gorilla who lived on the island where the ship’s survivors had been marooned would also join the crew. His name was Hairy Arnold. One villain was the pirate captain Horner, a man with a silver nose-piece because he had lost his real nose to a cannon shot. Another was a red-bearded dandy named Captain Dangerous. But the biggest villain of all was the Heretic, who turned out to be a demon in human guise. It was all about escaping from pirates who wanted to kill you and hitting soldiers with fish in the fish market. There were crocodile-headed men and little child-like fairies called Peris that lived in the city where Graff was trapped and transformed into a monster by the Heretic.
My plot was too convoluted and my characters too wildly diverse and unlikely. The result was something far too bizarre to be serious fiction. The only way it could actually be interpreted was as a piece of comedy. There-in lay the solution to my identity problem as a writer. I had to stop trying to be serious. My imagination too often bent the rules of physics and reality. So I had to stop trying for realism and believability.
In the end all the main characters die. All except for young Rene who becomes a pirate hunter. Of course, I follow Graff and Emery through to heaven because, well, it was a first person narrative and the narrator died. So, I vowed to myself that I would never let this horrible piece of nonsense see the light of day. I would never try to publish it, rewrite it, or even tell anyone about it. And so to this very day I… oopsie.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, humor, illustrations, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, Uncategorized
Last night my family and I went to the new Disney movie Jungle Book directed by John Favreau. It was the movie version I have been waiting for all my life.
The amazing thing about this movie is the way it took the book and layered its themes and central idea on top of the classic 60’s Disney cartoon. The music is still there and intact, though mostly moved to the end credits. The kid is still cute and mostly vulnerable, at least until the conclusion. And they have still given the Disneyesque comedic touch to the character of Baloo the bear, voiced by comedian Bill Murray in the this incarnation. But this is a live action movie and the kid-friendly Bowdlerization of the original story is a thing no longer.
A classic book illustration by E.J. Detmold
Fortunately for the young actor, Neel Sethi, they don’t require him to play the entire movie naked as would be required by a strictly by-the-book approach. They allow him the Disney-dignity of the cartoon red loin cover. But the sense of a human child facing the violence of the jungle naked, armed only with his creature-appropriate natural defenses, has been put back into the story. This version literally has teeth and claws. We see the boy’s body wounded and scarred during the course of his life in the jungle. And at a time of crucial confrontation, Mowgli takes the defense stolen from man village, a torch of the feared red flower, and throws it away into the water, facing the terrible tiger with only his wits and the abilities of his fangless, clawless human body. Thus, an essential theme I loved about the book when I was twelve is restored. Man has a place in the natural world even without the protections of civilization.
The story-telling is rich and nuanced, with multiple minor characters added. Gray Brother has been restored to Mowgli’s family. The fierce power of Mowgli’s wolf mother has been written back into the screenplay. And the character of Akela is given far more importance in the story than the cartoon could even contemplate. Although his role in aiding Mowgli to kill the tiger Shere Khan has been taken away from him, Akels’s death becomes the central motivation bringing Mowgli and Shere Khan together for the final inevitable confrontation. And this movie does not shy away from the reality of death as the cartoon did, resurrecting Baloo at the end and Kaa’s attempts to eat Mowgli being turned into a joke (though I would like to note if you have never read the book, Kaa is not supposed to be a villain. He was Mowgli’s wise and powerful friend in the book). Even the tiger survives in the cartoon version. This is no longer a cute cartoon story with a Disney sugared-up ending.
I will always treasure the 1960’s cartoon version. I saw it at the Cecil Theater in Mason City, Iowa when I was ten. I saw it with my mother and father and sisters and little brother. It was my favorite Disney movie of all time at that point in my life. I read and loved the book two years after that, a paperback copy that I bought with my own money from Scholastic book club back in 1968, in Mrs. Reitz’s sixth grade classroom. That copy is dog-eared, but still in my library. But this movie is the best thing that could possibly happen to bring all of that love of the story together and package it in a stunning visual experience.
Filed under art criticism, humor, movie review, Uncategorized
I would like to contend that a blog is a form of self-portrait. Do you want to argue with me? Have a piece of Gooseberry Pie….
You see, gooseberries aren’t made from geese. They don’t look like gooses… er, goosei… um, geese. They aren’t the favorite food of a goose, unless, maybe… Mother Goose. The name is a corrupted form of the Dutch word kruisbes , or possibly the German Krausbeere. You know, because people who speak English don’t know how to talk right. They don’t have anything to do with geese. In the same way, a person’s name doesn’t really help you understand the person that wears it. You have to dig deeper. Do you know, I have never actually tasted gooseberry pie? I have seen and even picked the gooseberries. They are danged ugly, spikey-furred snot-green berries. I am not tempted in any way to put one in my mouth. And yet, I should not judge gooseberry pie before I taste a piece. I know people who adore gooseberry pie. Maybe you are one of them.
CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29312
The point is, blogs are exactly the same thing. An artist, a writer, a producer of something, or a day-dreamy noodling goober has put together a blog to display their wares, show off their creations, and share their words and wisdom. You have to look at them, warts and all, and actually take a bite. You have to try them out and test them. Follow them over time. Read, absorb, and appreciate… not merely zoom through and look at the pictures… and maybe click “like” at the bottom of the post.
Of course, I admit, I do the very thing I am advising you not to do. The first few times I visit a blog, I scan through and only focus on a few things that catch my falling stars. (oop! Shame on me… I should say “catch my fancy”. Forgive me for lapsing into Mickian brain farts for a moment there). But if I am lured into coming back, I dip deeper and read more… tasting it thoroughly, as it were… And much of what I taste there will end up in my own recipe somewhere down the line. I begin to learn who that blogger is, and their writing style… sometimes even their thinking style (though I don’t read minds… only smell brain farts and odoriferous mental cooking smells) and I picture them as people in my minds eye. Sometimes I wonder if they match in real life the person I am picturing. Of course, the answer is no. People don’t look like what you think they should look like. They don’t even look like what they think they look like either… even in photos. So let me end this goofy pie-based argument about why blogs are self portraits with a few self portraits I have created that aren’t really what I look like , even if it is a photo.
Me in the mirror, 1980
Scary pictures of the artist as a creepy old man…
The novelist me…
A wizard selfie taken at Mad Ludwig’s Castle in Bavaria.
Who I am and who I was…
Seriously grumpy me…
Gag! Enough of the gooseberries already! Or are they gross-berries? I think that I really don’t look anything like me anymore.
Filed under artwork, autobiography, blog posting, goofiness, goofy thoughts, humor, metaphor, Uncategorized
Sometimes everything goes wrong. That, of course, is something that happens more often than the times when everything goes right. Lately I have had the fortune to experience the more common of those two sometimes.
My most recent publisher, the one that was supposed to publish Snow Babies, underwent a reduction in capacity and financial difficulties. They had to reorganize and reduce their commitments. That meant they could no longer publish any of my other novels. It apparently also means that they will no longer fulfill the publishing contract on Snow Babies. Bummer.
My new car, a Ford Fiesta that I bought from Enterprise Rental Car to replace my old Ford Fiesta that was unceremoniously killed by a passing motorist as it sat in front of my house, is now in the shop with it’s own hoof and mouth disease. While picking up kids from school, I hit a pothole on a Dallas street. Not just any pothole, but a huge camouflaged cavern of a pothole capable of taking a huge bite out of the right front wheel. I was not speeding. I did not do anything wrong but drive in place I have driven a hundred times previously… though this time it was after torrential rain and a bit of nasty hail that I had no way of knowing made potholes bigger and angrier and more horrible. I am surprised that it didn’t eat any other cars in the moderate traffic I was surrounded by. But I initially thought that once a passing motorist, younger and more pothole savvy than me, did the good Samaritan act of helping me change the tire, that I would only have to get the tire fixed or replaced and would be happily on my way again. No such luck. Not only was the tire ruined, but also the rim it was mounted on, and possibly the undercarriage of the car. It was going to cost at least the $500 deductible from my insurance company, unless something even worse happened that they couldn’t see without looking at their bank books a little harder. And I had to get another rental car in the mean time. But, of course, the recent hail storm not only had most of the rental cars rented, but the rental companies had lost cars to hail damage as well. I was stuck with a rather expensive Dodge Challenger that the car insurance can’t completely pay for. And I have no place to park it if the hail decides to revisit us this week. Double bummer.
And, of course, it doesn’t end there. Having kids in school is a challenge, especially this time of year with high-stakes testing going on. I can’t give you particulars because some things have to remain private, but even really bright kids like mine, the children of two teachers, can be subject to test-anxiety and failure and the resulting depression which can prove fatal if not taken seriously enough. Triple damn ding-dang bummer!
But we can’t let bad luck be the end-all of the story. I am a pessimist by nature. Nothing has happened to me recently that took me by surprise. I am always expecting the worst to happen, and life rarely disappoints me on that score. So I am not floored by these randomly-occurring sucker punches. Rather, I am given that shot of anger and adrenaline needed to pick myself up and start fighting back.
I have my novel Magical Miss Morgan almost ready to submit to another publisher that I found through a friend, with a couple of backup publishers to send it to after it is rejected the first time. I have researched three possibilities so far.
I talked to the insurance agent today to stop the hemorrhaging of money down the drain of car repairs, and though I have taken a pretty good-sized cannon shot in this battle, it will not sink my little pirate ship.
And a conference with principal and teacher and student and parent solved a lot of the other problem. It can be an advantage to a kid to have a teacher as a parent. We tend to know how everything works, and we speak the secret language of Edjumacation to help get things actually done.
So, no worries, man. Even though all my luck is bad luck, I am still lucky… since there is a lot of it.
Filed under angry rant, battling depression, education, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, pessimism, publishing, Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 