Some Art is created for the sake of illustrating my novels. So, today’s artwork is all about that.
Novel-ty Art
Filed under characters, illustrations, novel writing
Spokes-Dog
At breakfast I cooked smokies, small-sized fried sausages. Jade, our family dog got up to the table with the rest of us.
“I can eat twenty of those!” Jade said.
“No you can’t,” I said. “You are a dog and eat from a bowl on the floor. I didn’t even set a plate on the table for you. This is not dog food.”
“Dad? Did you see these coupons for Taco Bell on the table?” said the Princess.
“Oh, you mean, the Taco Bueno ads? Remember what the last trip to that other place gave us?”
“Oh, yeah. That was a horrible day spent in the bathroom,” she answered.
“The next time you go to Taco Bell, take me! ” said the dog. “I loved the taco meat I found on the table last time you made the mistake of leaving some there.”
“Well, I do know that Taco Bell is universally loved by dogs.”
“How do you know that?” asked the Princess.
“Don’t you remember the Taco Bell dog? Or were you too young when he was popular?”
“I think I was too young.”
“Look him up on the internet.”
“Oh, yeah! I kinda remember that. He was a talking dog, just like Jade.”
“Yes, but I think he mostly spoke Spanish.”
“He’s handsome!” said Jade. “But look, he’s on television with very short fur… he’s naked! That would be very embarrassing.”
“Yeah, when it comes to TV spokes-dogs, you’d probably prefer Spuds Mackenzie. He had more style.”
“I never heard of him,” said the Princess.
“Well, he was before you were born. He was the Budweiser spokes-dog.”
“Did he talk too?”
“Just party language. He was always chilling by the pool with beautiful human girls.”
“Let me see more of him!” demanded Jade.
“Wow!” said Jade. “A dog who drinks beer and plays guitar! I think I’m in love!”
“That was so long ago, though,” I said. “He is probably dead by now. The average life span of a dog is only about ten years at the most.”
“Oh, now I am depressed,” said Jade. “And you know the only cure for that is to give me some of the breakfast sausages!”
So, as I gave a dog a sausage, I was deeply regretting the whole talking dog thing.
Filed under family, family dog, goofiness, humor, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Saturdays With The Herculoids
When I was a kid in Iowa in the 1960’s Saturday morning television was the singular source of fuel for the imagination. I loved the various adventure cartoons. Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, Thundarr the Barbarian, and the Herculoids were the source of endless lets-pretend games in Granpa’s grove and in the old barn.
I suppose the characters I envisioned myself being the most often were Zandor and his son Dorno. These two practically naked people lived on a primitive planet that had to constantly be defended from space-faring invaders and free-booters that had ray-gun technology on their side. The only weapons that the practically naked barbarians were able to use against the villains were exploding rocks that were shot out of a slingshot by Zandor and Dorno and Tara, or out of the horn-gun on the head of Tundro the living tank-beast with too many legs. Of course, Igoo the giant rock ape could bop ’em with his big stone fists, or Zok the lightning dragon, could zap them with tail and eye lasers. And Gloop and Gleep, the living Play-Doh blobs, could also always shape themselves into flyswatters or springs or wet blankets, or… well, you have to see it to really get it.
I learned valuable lessons from watching the Herculoids and then pretending to be them. First of all, I learned that back-to-nature, practically-naked barbarians were morally superior to those who solve their problems with technology. I also learned that you can win fights with exploding rocks and yelling, “Zandor! Look out!” at the right time over computerized flying robots with lasers and disintegration rays. There was also the thing about never knowing when an old Space Ghost villain like Brakk or Moltarr was going to show up, and you needed to be ready to defeat them by doing the same things to them that Space Ghost had done to them in previous episodes. And for some reason, bad guys come with a psychological need to capture Tara or Dorno or both Tara and Dorno and put them in cages.
I hope there was nothing psycho-sexual embedded in those old episodes. That would be a terrible thing to do to an impressionable young boy who loved to watch the cartoons. Explain to me again, Alex Toth and Hanna Barbera, why are Zandor, Dorno, and Tara practically naked all the time? Oh, yes, it was a tropical planet. It must have been hot there.
Anyway, I must end this homage now, before I start analyzing how this somewhat bizarre cartoon actually affected me as a child. I loved the Herculoids. I still love them… no matter how goofy and weird they are.
Filed under Uncategorized
Making Portraits
My biggest regret as a cartoonist and waster of art supplies is the fact that I am not the world’s best portrait artist. I can only rarely make a work of art look like a real person. Usually the subject has to to be a person I love or care deeply about. This 1983 picture of Ruben looks very like him to me, though he probably wouldn’t recognize himself here as the 8th grader who told me in the fall of 1981 that I was his favorite teacher. That admission on his part kept me from quitting and failing as a first year teacher overwhelmed by the challenges of a poor school district in deep South Texas.
My Great Grandma Hinckley was really great.
My great grandmother on my mother’s side passed away as the 1970’s came to an end. I tried to immortalize her with a work of art. I drew the sketch above to make a painting of her. All my relatives were amazed at the picture. They loved it immensely. I gave the painting to my Grandma Aldrich, her second eldest daughter. And it got put away in a closet at the farmhouse. It made my grandma too sad to look at every day. So the actual painting is still in a closet in Iowa.
There were, of course, numerous students that made my life a living heck, especially during my early years as a teacher. But I was one of those unusual teachers (possibly insane teachers) who learned to love the bad kids. Love/hate relationships tend to endure in your memory almost as long as the loving ones. I was always able to pull the good out of certain kids… at least in portraits of them.
When kids pose for pictures, they are not usually patient enough to sit for a portrait artist. I learned early on to work from photographs, though it has the disadvantage of being only two-dimensional. Sometimes you have to cartoonify the subject to get the real essence of the person you are capturing in artiness.
But I can’t get to the point of this essay without acknowledging the fact that any artist who tries to make a portrait, is not a camera. The artist has to put down on paper or canvas what he sees in his own head. That means the work of art is filtered through the artist’s goofy brain and is transformed by all his quirks and abnormalities. Therefore any work of art, including a portrait that looks like its subject, is really a picture of the artist himself. So, I guess I owe you some self portraits to compare.
Yeah, that’s me at 10… so what?
Some New Artwork Just For the Fun of It
She’s a powerful swordswoman who happens to be from a humanoid race on a distant planet where everyone’s skin is lavender in color.
She’s a powerful Psion, Telepathy and Telekinesis. She also has absolutely no fashion sense.
These are characters who may possibly appear in the Cissy Moonskipper series of Sci-Fi novellas. Neither one has a decent star-warrior-type name. Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments.
Filed under Uncategorized
Confessions on the Prairie
Some songs are so beautiful and so true, that I cannot listen without tears in my eyes and burning fire in my heart.
“I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn‘t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the lord of song
With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah”
lyrics from “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen
You see, I believe in God… but my God is a bit bigger than most people’s God. In fact, most of the people who come closest to what I believe are atheists. My God is all of existence, the good and the bad both. He is above my understanding, but it is my place to constantly try to reach for Him and know Him and, sometimes, even be Him. Things that are impossible to accomplish, and yet we all do it on a daily basis.
My God does not punish sin. My God does not reward faith. My God does not ask anything of me beyond being. But since I exist, and since I believe that love and beauty are good things, if I want the universe around me to manifest love and beauty, then I must make it so. I must live as a loving person and a singer of beautiful songs… even if I can only sing silently in words on a page.
However did someone as dopey as me come up with something as dopey as this? Let me tell you a story.
When I was ten, an older boy, a neighbor, trapped me, de-pants me, and abused me. It was not love in any way. It was sexualized torture. He made me feel pain. He took away my sense of well-being. He made me afraid to touch or be touched by others. He made me believe my own physical urges were a terrible thing that God would punish me for. I wet my pants in school more than once, because I feared the boys’ bathroom at school. I no longer tried so hard to make the other kids laugh. I sank into depression. And ultimately, I thought about ending myself in painful ways, ways I felt I deserved.
Reverend Aiken is the one in the cowboy hat. His son, Mark, was my childhood best friend.
But I was blessed. My best friend’s father was the minister of the Methodist Church and, eventually, both churches in our little town. And in the late 60’s, the Methodists decided to be very progressive on matters of human sexuality. When I was twelve, he taught all the kids in my age group about sex using a blackboard and a willingness to frankly discuss anything we needed to know. Of course, he never quite figured out what my terrible secret was, in fact, I couldn’t have told him about it if I wanted to, the memory was repressed and I couldn’t call it up until that day in college when it all came back to me at age 22. But he knew it was there. He is the one that taught me that faith in God is about love. It is not about punishment, especially not punishment for biological urges and physical needs. People need love, and should never be castigated or humiliated because they seek it. And he told me that I was not to blame for the acts of others. The notion of original sin, that we are all born despicable because Adam goofed, is nonsense. All people, even the bad ones, are God’s children and worthy of love. People can be redeemed from anything. And it is the job of worthy people to be the love that informs the universe. We must do good deeds and love, honor, and, most of all, render aid to others. Because that fills the universe with goodness and light.
Both the good Reverend Aiken and my abuser are dead now. I deeply love one, and I forgive the other. And it’s because that’s what God is… love and forgiveness. It has to be so.
Did you listen to that song from YouTube? If you made it this far through this rather difficult ramble without listening to it, I recommend you click on it and give it a try. It is about King David sinning with Bathsheba, and repenting his sin before God. And in the end, there was no punishment for him. So, I, too stand before the lord of song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.
Filed under Uncategorized
The Juggler
I have many objects to keep up in the air.
So many, in fact, that it doesn’t seem fair.
Ah, the lovely anapest… to mesmerize annoying pests,
And render up to mighty Zeus, the laughs begot by Dr. Seuss.
It will not help me to succeed,
To laugh and smile at needy needs,
But objects dance and keep on flying,
Though of the truth, I’m sure I’m lying.
(I’ll bet you forgot how well I can write really terrible poetry!)
Filed under Uncategorized
The Silent Sonata
Being a writer is a life of music that happens only in your head. You hear voices constantly. They pulse rhythmically with insights and ideas that have to be written down and remembered. Otherwise, the music turns into clashing cymbals, dark and depressing. Monday, I wrote a deeply personal thank you to the Methodist minister who saved my life when I was a boy. I posted a YouTube music video by the acapella group Pentatonix with that essay in a vain attempt to give you an idea of the music in my head when I composed that very difficult piece to give myself a measure of peace.
I realize that I am not writing poetry here. Poetry can so easily slip into melody and music because of rhythm and meter and rhyme. And yet, words to me are always about singing, about performing, about doing tricks with metaphor and meaning, rhythm, convoluted sentence structure, and other sneaky things that snake-oil salesman do to get you to think what you are hearing is precisely what you needed to hear. The Sonata of Silence… did you notice the alliteration of the silvery letter “S” in that title? The beat of the syllables? Da-daah-da a da-da? The way a mere suggestion of music can bring symphonic sounds to your ear of imagination as you read? The way a simple metaphor, writing is music, can be wrapped into an essay like a single refrain in a symphonic piece?
A sonata is a musical exercise in three or four movements that is basically instrumental in nature. You may have noticed that the movements are loosely defined here by the accompanying pictures, of which there are three. And it is silent only in the way that the instruments I am using themselves make no noise in the physical world. The only sounds as I type these words are the hum of an old air conditioner and the whirr of my electric fan. Yet my mind is filled with crescendos of violins and cellos, bold brass, and soft woodwinds. The voice saying these words aloud only in my head is me. Not the me you hear when I talk or the me I can hear on recordings of my own voice, but rather the me that I always hear from the inside. And the voice is not so much “saying” as “singing”.
Writing makes music. The writer can hear it. The reader can too. And whether I croon it to make you cry, or trill it to make you laugh, I am playing the instrument. And so, the final notes of the sonata are these. Be happy. Be well. And listen for the music.
Chess with the Reaper… ongoing
I have successfully moved to Iowa. But it is not a solution to every problem I face while trying to keep living for a while longer. I have got my extensive list of medical care needs transferred, mostly successfully, but I am still struggling with several important things.
Like the jester in the Paffooney, I have little control over the many strings I have to deal with in making the puppets work in my novel-writing projects. Arthritis hinders my fingers on the keyboard. I have lost my resistance to the power that ragweed pollen has over my lungs and sinuses. Too many Octobers in Texas have resensitized me to Iowa’s potent allergy-sufferer’s bane. Diabetes is out of control on some days now, too, for no apparent reason. Knight takes the king’s bishop and puts me in the hole. The Reaper grins at me across the chessboard.
I can’t change my current address on the Medicare website. I have to go through the Social Security Office to change it, and the federal government is shut down, so the Office is on unpaid vacation.
Queen takes King’s Rook. Oh no! I don’t actually have a legally written will.
But I have sold three books this month. So, maybe the game is not over yet.
Filed under Uncategorized
How It Should Be… According to Mickey
My bicycle was red. It was red and looked just like the ones that Captain Kangaroo had in his commercials that we watched on a black-and-white TV every day before we walked or rode our bicycle to school, across town a whole long seven blocks away. After school I could ride it out a whole mile and a half to Jack’s farm with Bobby and Richard and Mark the preacher’s kid to go skinny dipping in the cold creek in Jack’s South pasture. Jack was younger than any of us except Bobby. And it was a golden age.
Spiderman comic books and Avengers comic books cost twelve cents to own, but they were forbidden. And as much as we sneaked them and passed them around until they fell apart, usually in Bobby’s hands, we never knew that Dr. Wertham had gone to Congress to make our parents believe that comic books would make us gay and violent. He was a psychiatrist who wrote a book, so even if you didn’t believe him, you had to worry about such things.
I believed in Santa Claus until 1967. And after I found out, I only despaired a tiny little bit, because I began to understand you have to grow up. And adults can lie to you, even if they don’t do it to be mean. And the world is a hard place. And the golden age ended in November of 1963 when JFK was assassinated.
In June of 1968 I rode my bicycle out to the Bingham Park woods, Once there, I took off all my clothes and put them in the bicycle basket, and then I rode up and down the walking paths through the trees with nothing between me and God but my skin. I had a serious think about how life should be. All the while I was terrified that someone might see me. I was naked and vulnerable. A mere two years before that I had been sexually assaulted and was terrified of older boys, especially when I was naked and vulnerable. But I was a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals and Bob Gibson. They were repeated World Series winners. And they beat the Yankees in the series in 1964. And more important than that, cardinals were the little red songbirds who never flew away when the winter came. You don’t give up in the face of hardship. You face the trouble. No matter how deep the snow may pile up.
And in 1969, the first man to walk on the moon showed that a Star Trek world was in reach of mankind. Star Trek was on every afternoon after school. I watched a lot of those episodes at Verner’s house on his family’s black-and-white TV. The Klingons were always bested or beaten because the crew of the Enterprise outsmarted them. You can solve the problems of the universe with science. I know this because of all the times Mr. Spock proved it to me not just by telling me so, but by showing me how you do it. And what you can achieve is greatly enhanced if you work together like Spock and Kirk and Bones… and sometimes Scotty always did.
So, what is the way it should be? What did Mickey decide while naked in the forest like a Dakota Sioux shaman on a spirit-quest?
JFK’s 108th birthday was on May 29th. Dr. Wertham has been dead for 44 years. Bob Gibson was 85 when he passed away in October of 2020. Captain Kirk turned 94 in March of this year.
The Golden age is long gone. There is no single set of rules that can clearly establish how it should be now. But I like those ideas of how it should be that I established for myself while naked on a Schwinn Spitfire in a forest long ago.
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Filed under autobiography, cardinals, comic book heroes, commentary, humor, inspiration, oldies, Paffooney, philosophy
Tagged as art, books, fear, fiction, golden-age, movies, nakedness, poetry, reading, Star Trek, writing