Category Archives: Uncategorized

April 24, 2016 · 4:52 pm

Jungle Book

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.

MOWGLI_AND_SHANTI_by_FERNL

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.

the-jungle-book-2016-poster-header-165110

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Filed under art criticism, humor, movie review, Uncategorized

Tagged as classic Disney cartoons, humor, John Favreau, Jungle Book, movie review, Mowgli, Rudyard Kipling

April 21, 2016 · 3:23 pm

Gooseberry Pie

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….

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/531670/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.

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, blog posting, goofiness, goofy thoughts, humor, metaphor, Uncategorized

Tagged as artists, bloggers, goofiness, gooseberry pie, metaphor, self portraits

April 20, 2016 · 7:22 pm

Mr. Lucky

Self Portrait vxv

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.

class Miss Mcover

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.

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Filed under angry rant, battling depression, education, humor, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, pessimism, publishing, Uncategorized

Tagged as car repair, humor, insurance woes, novel writing, paffooney, publishing

April 17, 2016 · 8:31 pm

Superheroes from the 60’s

DSCN7083

I was a comic book nut from a very early age. I started collecting comics in 1966 when I was ten years old. Almost as soon as I started collecting them, I began copying the drawings, copying Spiderman, Hawkeye, Captain America, Avengers, and Batman. I am a comic book lover, and I am also a comic book plagiarist. But I promise to use my own artwork and photographs to illustrate this blog post. After all, I am illustrating being a copy cat.

Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Lad in the style of artist Curt Swan in 1962.

My parents didn’t approve of kids with comic books. I desperately wanted Spiderman comic books and Avengers comic books, like the ones I read in the barbershop every time I was waiting for a haircut. But they had gotten wind of Frederic Wertham’s campaign against comic books two years before I was even born. The learned psychiatrist insisted that comic books corrupted children with sexual images hidden in the artwork (oh, gawd, look where Saturn Girl’s hands are… close anyway), Batman and Robin were homosexuals trying to influence young boys to be gay, Wonder Woman was a lesbian who was into bondage. This he said in 1954, but it didn’t really reach my parents’ ears in rural Iowa for another 12 years. The result was severe limits on my comic book ownership possibilities. But Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes were acceptable, as were Casper the Friendly Ghost and Scrooge McDuck.

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So, my copy above of Curt Swan’s work is from the Legion of Superheroes. Superman was boy-scout enough to qualify too. I could get by with Tarzan even though he was a mostly naked guy running around the jungles. And time and money solve a lot of problems. I was allowed to subscribe to Avengers and X-men and the Amazing Spiderman once I had field-work money to put towards it. I drew lots of comic book heroes from that point onwards.

Superman 1

I learned how to draw men with unhealthy amounts of muscles, women with waists that would break in two with the amount of breastly boobage a teenage boy would pack on top, and numerous people who actually seemed to think capes made sense as a fashion statement. I also learned how to do shading in pen and ink and foreshortening from master artists like John Romita Jr. and George Perez and Barry Windsor-Smith. And I would be remiss if I didn’t give proper credit to Murphy Anderson and Jack “King” Kirby. I know you don’t know who those people are because you are not the comic book nut I am… nobody is. But believe me, they are masters of an American Art form. And I will never be one of them, because even though I am almost as good as some of them, I chose to be a teacher instead of being a comic book artist, a thing I could’ve so easily succeeded at back in the 1980’s. You should know this too… I have never regretted making that choice.

Aquaman

Walker

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Filed under artwork, autobiography, comic book heroes, humor, Paffooney, Uncategorized

Tagged as Aquaman, Captain America, colored pencil, comic book art, copying comics, humor, Legion of Super-Heroes, Superman

April 10, 2016 · 4:40 pm

Blog Happy

I can’t seem to help blogging daily on this goofy little blog spot. I am a writer and I write every day whether I publish anything or not. I am not connecting with readers through my published novels. In fact, I seem to be nose against a brick wall with publishing anything further in novel form despite doing well in writing competitions. Publishers exist mainly to make money for corporations, and creators of content of any kind are only paid serious money when the publishers are forced to by the healthy flow of cash into certain authors’ established platforms. But feeling sorry for myself is a full time job and doesn’t pay very well… actually, if you can’t afford a lawyer, it doesn’t pay anything at all. Instead I have been looking at the arc of this blog and rereading old posts. To my amazement, I actually communicate ideas much more interestingly than the goofy-drunk word-flinger I thought I was. Let me recount some of it so I can get the benefit of clip-show laziness the way television shows do.

http://www.welkmusicalfamily.com/welkcomepage.html

Yesterday’s post was about the Lennon Sisters, a nostalgia post where I slathered on some goopy nostalgia about being a farm boy spending Saturday nights at my grand parents’ house and salted it with YouTube videos of the sisters singing some of my favorite songs from the Lawrence Welk Show.

The day before saw two posts about collecting Star Wars Action Figures, the twelve-inch size, not the three-inch. They are a part of my over-all G.I. Joe/ Barbie obsession and have to be the same size. One post was about the collection, and the other was a correction because I goofed on font size with speech balloons.

The post before that was me mooning about this year’s apple blossoms and how I use them to counteract the moaning about how ill allergies make me while doing yard work.

Before that was an extra-silly post about where creativity comes from, which recognizes the fact that I do, indeed, fall into the general category of “too creative to be outside of a mental institution”, but actually have no earthly idea why.

That post was preceded by a post about my antique library books that I treat as treasure, though I found them at Goodwill prices or got them free as library discards. The Sherlock Holmes books were even rescued from the middle school trash bin.

Prior to that was a post moaning about having to deal with my daughter’s cold. It gave me an excuse to re-post an old picture I drew that looks remarkably like my daughter the Princess, even though I drew it in colored pencil fifteen years before she was born and eight years before I even got married.

The post before that was about marketing my published book, and how the review I paid for ended up being about the wrong book (same title, different author). The mistake made by the book-review company has not been corrected yet even as of this writing. They haven’t refunded my money either, I have noticed.

Before that was a collage post of collected artwork and photographs from my Monster Movie file. It focused mainly on the Universal movie monsters, and it provided a worthy use for my habit of filling my computer’s memory with all kinds of pictures copied from the internet. I am a hoarder and collector in so many disgusting ways.

And on the first day of April I posted an April Fool’s Day post full of pictures I have drawn of fools and photos of foolish things.

The conclusions I have drawn by looking at the last ten days of posting include these; I definitely do not think in straight lines. I think in quirky squiggles that double back on themselves and allow freaky ideas to meet themselves mid-sentence. I also crave loopy levels of variety and my selections of topics and illustrations are completely unpredictable. I like bright colors. I dwell mostly in the past, though sometimes in the future. My mind is a lot like a boomerang, travelling woop-woop-woop willy-nilly through the air, but always coming back to essentially the same things over and over. I call all of this humor, though not all of this is funny because humor is basically pointed and takes you by surprise more often than not. But if it is good humor, you can’t help telling yourself, “You know, when you stop to think about it, it is funny, but it’s also true.”

I came back to this post today thinking, “Wouldn’t it be a great idea to take some old blog posts, essays like this one, and put them all together into e-book form. But then I began tinkering with the mechanics of the format, and then I realized, I use too darn much incompatible media to put into book form under the current Amazon publishing set-up. And how do I shift my full-color imagination into strictly black-and-white? So, there’s another blogging notion that requires a re-visit on another day.

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Filed under blog posting, humor, Uncategorized, writing humor

Tagged as blog review, blogging as obsession, goofiness, how I blog, humor, stupid blogging

April 9, 2016 · 12:53 am

Because You Couldn’t Read What They Said

This is just an extra post to make up for one little oopsie I made. You couldn’t really read the speech balloons in the previous post because I made them too small for the post size. So I took a tiny bit of dynamite and blew them up. Besides, I need to test my computer security system as it keeps saying someone is stealing my WordPress posts.

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Filed under doll collecting, humor, Uncategorized

Tagged as doll collecting, humor, Star Wars

April 7, 2016 · 3:03 pm

Apple Blossoms Return to Texas

appleblossomval

There are certain things that keep me going when my connection to the mortal coil begins to chafe and itch. Apple blossoms are one of those things. The apple blossoms have bloomed in our two Texas apple trees in April of 2016. As I was raking endless live oak leaves out of my yard, making it harder for myself to breathe and continue living because I am allergic to live oak… and most of the rest of Texas to boot, I saw that the apple blossoms had burst forth from their buds. Between coughs and gasps for breathe, it made me smile. I ended the raking of endless live oak leaves after only thirty minutes and one sack of leaves. I am laboring in the face of impending doom, but I am not stupid. I needed to live to rake another day. Otherwise I’ll never get it done.

But apple blossoms are worth the heartache and pain and toil of life. They are not only something to remind me why I keep going. They are a reason for being. So I used my phone camera to take a picture of an open blossom. Then I photo-shopped in a picture of my novel character, Valerie Clarke, the character I created as an amalgam of my lovely daughter and the pretty little girl in my third grade class that I fell madly in love with when I was a little boy. Like most artists, I am quite capable of slapping beautiful things and ideas together haphazardly to make something that is either a huge pile of kitschy crap, or even more beautiful. And like most artists, I am entirely too close to the feelings and memories and realities that make up this work of art to ever know for sure which of the two things it really is. Forgive me if I chose the opposite one that you did. I try not to offend with my Paffoonies. I try not to be a creep or a bore or a Philistine… but those things are not always possible to avoid. But there are apple blossoms, and sunrises, and a number of other things as well that, in the end, balance out the equations quite nicely.

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Filed under artwork, feeling sorry for myself, finding love, humor, illness, Paffooney, philosophy, strange and wonderful ideas about life, Uncategorized

Tagged as apple blossoms, goofiness, humor, philosophy, photo-shopped artwork, random goofy thoughts, Valerie Clarke

April 4, 2016 · 3:00 pm

The Princess is Ill

girl n bird

My daughter started complaining of feeling ill yesterday afternoon. Her fever hit a high point of 100.3. But the doctor says it is merely a cold. A viral infection. So today’s post is short and to the point… a rare thing for me… because lives are disrupted and we have to follow a trail to recovery.

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Filed under autobiography, illness, Uncategorized

April 2, 2016 · 3:38 pm

Monster Pictures

Here are images from the Monster Movie collection I keep as an obsessive-compulsive hoarding disorder style of thing. I thought I would present them as a collage since I am lazy today and want to save words for my novel project.