Here is a portrait of Valerie Clarke and her Daddy, Kyle Clarke. They are important characters in the novel I am working on now, When the Captain Came Calling. Valerie is also a main character in Snow Babies. Here is what the double portrait looks like with a farmhouse background.
A picture like this might prove useful in a number of ways. For today it makes a good post when I don’t need to write so many words.
Filed under artwork, colored pencil, Paffooney, Uncategorized
I spent some considerable time working on the Naked Hearts trilogy in my blog, writing about nothing but girl students who fell in love with me. That was a sort of Narcissistic writing experience that convinced me that I was somehow worthy of the love those young ladies felt in their little pink hearts. I was not. At least, not more deeply than the teacher-student level… the appreciation level. Because there is love and then there is LOVE. I have never really felt any sort of desire for a student. Dread, yes, desire, no. It is not only something illegal, but it is really downright icky. The students that fill your classroom are all incomplete works of art. The paint is not dry and can easily be smeared. I am never the artist involved, so it is not my place to ever touch the oil paint of their lives, not even with skilled touches of the paintbrush. But the one time I really regretted not having the ability to do touch-ups and help others to see what I can clearly see in a brilliant work of monkey-house art, it was with an incomplete little oil painting known as Wally.
Wally Nardling was a bright, talented, and gloriously goofy young boy with a zest for life that nothing, it seemed, could kill. My Paffooney portrait above not only looks like him, it looks exactly like him. And that is not because I am a gifted portrait artist. I am not. I am a cartoonist. But Wally was a living, breathing cartoon character with a cartoon personality to go with it. It was a golly-gee personality like he was the boy Sherman from Jay Ward’s Mr. Peabody and Sherman time-travelling cartoons. He was always ready to try any new thing and experience any creative idea, without ever for a moment stopping to consider consequences, or thinking about how others might see him or think about him. He was good at drawing Japanese manga-style cartoon people. He drew in colored pencil just like me, cartooning all over his notebook and folder and, sometimes, even the margins of his homework. He was very creative, and had numerous off-the-wall ideas that made other students cringe as he explained them to the class. He was very proud of his accomplishments as a reader, and bragged about the books he had read, including every book of the Harry Potter series (which actually was three books shy of being finished at the time). Other students, especially some of the non-reading Hispanic students, hated everything about him. After all, his father, Dr. Nardling was the absent-minded professor type of teacher who taught them in fifth grade, and he could be downright mean to kids who tried to get away with monkey-nonsense in his classroom. And his mother was a medical doctor from Mexico, but Wally had not learned any Spanish at all in his brief time on Earth. He was the butt of every poo-poo joke the vatos could pool their limited monkey brains to think up. Other boys, especially the vatos, were cruel to him at every opportunity. (Vatos, if you are not aware, are the semi-criminal cool guys of Latino culture who lurk in the boys’ bathrooms with gold chains around their necks and the faint smell of mota, which they may have recently been smoking on their clothes.)
Well, his seventh grade year, in my Gifted and Talented Class, we got involved in the Odyssey of the Mind creativity contests. I intended to put a link here, but WordPress is giving me trouble, so here is the web address; http://www.odysseyofthemind.com/
Wally was a natural. We put together teams to handle different problems that the contest offered. Wally always got chosen last for teams in real life, but nerd class was different. The other two boys, H. G. Ruff and Jack Penny immediately recruited Wally for their team. They chose the project where you had to design and build a balsa-wood structure to hold up as much weight as possible while you present a creative narration of the unfolding event. H.G. and Jack cooked up the two-headed narrator idea, sewed the costume where they could both get into the same shirt and pair of pants to provide the two wise-cracking heads. They left it entirely up to Wally to design the structure. This he did brilliantly, a cone of balsa bits with numerous cross beams to hold up weight, and super-glue to hold it all together.
We went all the way to Del Rio for the regional contest. The performance was supposed to build suspense as the team (basically meaning Wally) piled up increasingly heavy weights on the structure, trying not to crush it. The other competing teams went ahead of us, the first one crushing their rig almost immediately, and having to hope their song-and-dance routine would fill out the rest of the time limit. The team that had the best reputation managed to pile on only two pounds ten ounces before their structure collapsed. That was a full eight pounds less than they supposedly had piled on in practice. We started our performance with H.G. and Jack already gloating over the win.
The two headed narrator cracked some of the best jokes H.G. had ever written. (I had nixed all of the jokes Jack contributed. He was a master of scatological humor, and we knew ahead of time that event judges were all female.) Wally had two pounds already balanced on the structure. And then, his enthusiasm failed him. Instead of adding the five-ounce weights the way the other team had, he tried to put on a whole pound more with one weight. Over-confidence killed it. The balsa wood cracked and gave out. H.G. forgot two thirds of his remaining lines, and we ended up short of the minimum time limit, too. We lost by ten ounces, which when translated into the complex scoring system, meant we narrowly lost over all. Second place and no trip to the State tournament.
The other boys blamed Wally for the loss, though they hadn’t really pulled off their part either. The worst part was that Wally blamed himself.
“It’s my darn fault, Mr. B,” he told me with tears in his eyes.
“You got us this far, Wally. You did a good job. You built the actual structure.”
“Jack and H.G. are gonna keep on calling me Wally Weasley and making fun of me in front of the girls.”
“In many ways, you are more like Harry Potter,” I said. “You have more magical ability in you than they will ever have. You just have to keep believing in yourself.”
He grinned at me with that goofy grin of his. “I know. One day I will be able to turn H.G. into a frog.”
If I ever did anything to teach that boy something he didn’t already know, I don’t know what it could be. One day he will create a cure for cancer, or explore the surface of Mars, and I will have not had any sort of hand in it in any way. He was a diamond in the rough, and I simply wasn’t capable of polishing a diamond like that.
Filed under humor, Paffooney, teaching, Uncategorized
Okay, people, I am not a poet and I’m sure you know it… But sometimes cartoonists rhyme for no good raisin… and make bad puns too. Today I will share with you a bit of versicular (verse+ick+ular) goofiness that I tend to call poetry. I am putting some in my vault, here; Poetry in the Vault (Mickey’s House of Fiction)
Sleeping Beauty (a Silly Poem of Love and Illusion)
In the dark and in the light
In candle flame and purple night
The beauty sleeps and fails to heed
The young man’s life of lust and need
What happens next is often sad
The want, the hope, the love so bad
And fluttering faery wings of light
Carry life and love and fuel the sight
With never a thought to what could be
If only love would call to thee
And wake the sleeper from her dream
To make the two but one to seem.
Hear the Music (a love poem)
The singer sings his song,
And wants the world to sing along,
Though the world has gone all wrong,
And the darkness stays too long.
The singer warms and croons,
Under bright romantic moons,
And carries hopeful tunes,
To the listening dolts and loons.
Can a song bring truth to light?
Can it help us win the fight?
Does it ease the world’s plight?
And set the wrongs aright?
Yes a song can save the world,
Though the truth must be unfurled,
And the listeners’ ears are twirled.
So the hurts will all be pearled.
Mickey at the Wishing Well of Souls
I found a country well, and I thought I had a quarter,
But I fished in pockets hard, and found nothing for the warter,
And since I had to warp a line to make the poem rhyme,
I figured I would just look in, because I had the time.
I looked into the warty water which sat there still and deep,
And could not see the bottom, and I began to weep.
The water was clear and dark and black,
And the only thing I saw… was Mickey looking back.
And nothing of the wishing well, its magic could I see,
For only there just staring back, the secret thing was me.
Mental Pie
I’d like to offer you a piece of my mind,
Though not a lecture, rant, or complaint,
But rather a piece of mental pie.
Its taste will be very sweet, you will find,
As I’m constantly thinking in ink and paint,
That gives you wings and allows you to fly.
The Cookie
Once I had a cookie… But every time I took a bite, It became smaller and smaller…
With each bite I had less and less cookie left.
But when it was gone, the sweet taste of it…
Lingered on… as memory.
Icarus (A Song Lyric with No Tune)
“You never believe in me,
You only hear the lie,
You never believe in me,
You never even try,
You never see the good in me,
You only fear I’ll die,
You never hear the words I say,
You never tell me why,
You never care how I plan,
Or why I touch the sky,
You’ll never lift me up,
You never let me fly,”
That’s how it always was,
Between my father and I,
Until the day I reached the sun,
And burned my hands on high,
And so it is he’ll never know,
How much his son was worth,
Because he couldn’t understand,
The day
I fell
To Earth.
I gave you fair warning. Pogo has been coming to Mickey’s Catch a Falling Star Blog for a while now. So, if you intended to avoid it, TOO BAD! You are here now in Okefenokee Swamp with Pogo and the gang, and subject to Mickey’s blog post about Walt Kelly and his creations.
Walt Kelly began his cartoon hall-of-fame career in 1936 at Walt Disney Studios. If you watch the credits in Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo, you will see Walt listed as an animator and Disney artist. In fact, he had almost as much influence on the Disney graphic style as Disney had on him. He resigned in 1941 to work at Dell Comics where he did projects like the Our Gang comics that you see Mickey smirking at here, the Uncle Wiggly comics, Raggedy Ann and Andy comics, and his very own creations like Pogo, which would go on to a life of its own in syndicated comics. He did not return to work at Disney, but always credited Disney with giving him the cartoon education he would need to reach the stratosphere.
ask.metafilter.com
Walt Kelly’s Earth Day comic
Pogo is an alternate universe that is uniquely Walt Kelly’s own. It expresses a wry philosophy and satirical overview of our society that is desperately needed in this time of destructive conservative politics and deniers of science and good sense.
maxriffner.com
Pogo himself is an every-man character that we are supposed to identify with the most. He is not the driver of plots and doings in the swamp, rather the victim and unfortunate experiencer of those unexpectable things. Life in Okefenokee is a long series of random events to make life mostly miserable but always interesting if approached with the right amount of Pogo-ism.
And Pogo was always filled with cute and cuddly as well as ridiculous.
As a boy, I depended on the comic section of the Sunday paper to make sense of the world for me. If I turned out slightly skewed and warped in certain ways, it is owing to the education I myself was given by Pogo, Lil Abner, Dagwood Bumstead, and all the other wizards from the Sunday funnies. There was, of course, probably no bigger influence on my art than the influence of Walt Kelly.
So what more can I say about Walt Kelly? I haven’t yet reached the daily goal of 500 words. And yet, the best way to conclude is to let Walt speak for himself through the beautiful art of Pogo.
Filed under cartoon review, cartoons, humor, Paffooney
Puzzle Fizzle (a poem about pieces)
When life shatters into a potpourri of pieces,
One must pick up possibilities,
And puzzle them back together… into poetry.
Yesterday was the bottom of the valley of a hard week. I have to climb another mountain to get out. And I can’t afford the psychiatrist I need because the health insurance we have gave us strict guidelines to follow for choosing one, and no one in our area fits their requirements. My car is showing warning lights again, and I am afraid to take it in. It runs fine. But I don’t need that warning light giving any of the local mechanics the idea that they can charge me large fees for car parts and service hours when they might not actually be needed. Money is running out and I do not have the good enough health required to get even a part time job. I write a lot. But my writing career at this point is an expense, not an income. Many shattered pieces to this puzzle. But I did finish the putting together of the latest grand Paffooney, the portrait of Mary and the Invisible Captain Dettbarn.
So, how will I put everything back together? My family depends on me doing so. The old puzzle piecer must never give up and must always keep puzzling, fitting bizarre piece to jagged hole. You may have noticed that this post is short of the 500-word goal, but a picture is worth a thousand words, and I have created two original pictures for this post. And there is poetry pieced together by the penultimate alliteration of the proud letter “P”.
Well, I almost got a ticket in a school zone this morning. The sun was in my eyes and I was driving a steady 31 miles an hour in a twenty mile per hour zone. Fortunately the young officer apparently was fooled by my decrepit old man act (which I do incredibly well because I have had arthritis for forty years and I look like death warmed over in the morning… and I am not actually acting). I was let off with a warning and threats of a beating next time. Portents of bad times continue. I have another oil change warning light on my dashboard even though I just had the old Ford Fiesta at the dealer last week, having the engine put back in because Walmart blew it up. The conspiracy theorist in me was noticing particularly odd-shaped contrails in the skies over Garland and East Dallas. I have been told by fellow conspiracy theorists that the guvvamint is spraying nano-particles in the upper atmosphere to fix global warming so they don’t have to admit it exists and was caused by aliens. And I can believe these tinfoil hatters because they showed me proof that the CIA has altered their DNA with fluoridated water. Nobody could have that pointy of a pin-head without guvvamint help. So life continues to treat me the way Bugs Bunny treats Elmer Fudd. And I feel slapped silly.
But here’s the important thing;
Followed by;
And then;
So you can see that I haven’t given up yet. My flower petals burst with color. And the seeds that I have planted continue to grow and blossom anew.
The Princess
I am a serious addict. I have that sort of disorder-filled personality, as you can plainly tell from my goofy doll-collecting posts. But a serious addiction I don’t apologize for is my addiction to talking to my kids. Seriously, they are funny-funny and interesting people. If you don’t talk to your kids, then you are seriously missing out on the benefits of this very powerful drug.
My number two son, Henry, was telling me the other day that one time in class the History teacher caught him daydreaming and staring at a Mercator Map of the World.
“What are you staring so intently at that map for, Henry?” the teacher asked.
“Just planning world domination,” Henry answered.
The rest of the class laughed at that, including the teacher, but my number two son does, in fact, think constantly about how the world could be ruled better. He likes arcologies which are Paolo Saleri’s concept of fusing architecture in cities with the natural environment. Here is one of the sites he studies and makes drawings from; https://arcosanti.org/theory/arcology/main.html
The first time I heard about the Arcosanti thing… ever… was when Henry asked my opinion about Arcosanti and whether he could make a lot of money designing arcologies.
“What?” I asked. A half hour of intensive and detailed explanation later I said, “Oh.”
The Princess, his younger sister, is more intent on being an artist. Perhaps inspired by me, or perhaps by genetic abnormality, she is determined to make her fortune as an animator. Specifically she wants to create Japanese-anime-style science fiction movies about the future. She showed me her latest drawing just yesterday.
“That is very good, Princess,” I said. “But why are the boy’s gloves on fire? And why is he still wearing them?”
“Daaaad! Those aren’t gloves. Those are his hands!”
“Oh, sorry. My bad. So, why are his hands on fire?”
“He’s using his special magical-fire-power thing to throw fireballs.”
“Oh, that explains it. It’s a Goku thing?”
“Daaaad! Dragonball Z is lame. This is a science fiction story about Project Phoenix Rangers defending their moon base from evil dragon-aliens.”
“Oh. That’s nice.”
So I enjoy talking to my kids. I learn new stuff about You-Tube comedy videos, Minecraft, and Gamer-gate… you know, things that really matter in life.
“Dad?” asked Henry suddenly, “What’s your opinion of the use of tactical chickens in warfare?”
“Tactical chickens?”
Tactical chickens?
“Yes, if we intensify their raptor genes and teach them to carry explosive devices and lasers into battle… you know chickens and turkeys are descended from tyrannosaurs. Robert Bakker the paleontologist says that bird-hipped dinosaurs evolved into birds. He says tyrannosaurs are closer to turkeys than they are to crocodiles.”
“So, you want to revolutionize warfare with exploding chickens?” I asked.
“Tactical exploding chickens. Or maybe strategic is a better word. Cause they could also hunt down enemy soldiers and eat them, or lead laser-guided bombs to the enemies’ headquarters.”
Where else in this old word can you listen to creative ideas and innovations like that? Where else indeed? And it appeals to me because I tend to think like that too. I’m goofy like that.
Filed under autobiography, humor, Paffooney
I am once again needing to write an easy post because I am feeling quite ill. So let me talk about an artist thing that is totally boring for those who already know about this stuff and fascinating to anyone who always wanted to know art secrets from the secret tomes of drawing-wizards and painting-wizards. So here is some of the arcana gleaned from years of experimentation in the tippy-top of Mickey’s wizard’s tower.
Pen and Ink – When I first discovered I could make pencil pictures of naked girls, long about the magical-hormone-age of twelve, I began regretting the fact that pencil pictures easily smear. So, I had to find a further magical technique to make the pretties stay free of the dark clouds of graphite smudge. The magic wand I chose first was the ink pen with black ink. 
Of course, I am not using examples of middle-school me drawing naked pen-and-ink girls. Mothers, girlfriends, and wives make those things go away. But I am showing examples that have magical little elements in them that reveal my secrets. One thing that magically works is filling shapes and areas of the drawing in with specific patterns. The crosshatch work in the mermaid picture is obvious in the mountains and the mermaid’s hair. Not as obvious is the suggested scale-pattern in the mermaid’s fish tail. Notice how it only fills in the areas I need to suggest shadow and create 3-D form. The pattern that makes the floor for the hoola-hooper is a pattern that subtly suggests radioactivity.
This high school art project, the very first in incarnation of Rabbit Castle, shows my utter failure to effectively use pen and ink wash. I think I did get the wood pattern and the brick pattern right. But the filling of areas with diluted ink wash was a total mad failure of mud-making proportions. I decided against further using pen and ink wash in high school.
Water Color – I also experimented with adding life to drawings by using water color. Don’t look too closely at this horse-head bookend picture because I accidentally gave the poor pony severe-plaque psoriasis with watercolor, something I wouldn’t wish even on a horse made out of plaster or stoneware. Water color is difficult for me because I am highly controlled when I draw. I do not like the many “happy accidents” of the water-color world. I do not adapt well to runny color. So, water color also became a NO for me in high school.
Colored Pencil – I did however find magic when I first learned to blend colored pencil colors on the page and create full-color drawings. I especially like the fact that bright colors are easy to manipulate and contrast for me. I am somewhat color-blind (red-green color-blindness that is worse in my left eye than my right). I like colors I can actually see. If you look carefully at this picture of Bobby and Horatio T. Dogg, you will notice that this is solely made up of colored pencil lines and shading and color-blends. It was with this media that I found my true art mojo.
Mixed Media – So the style I most often use for the magic of forging Paffoonies is a mixture of my two favorite media… colored pencil and pen and ink. So here is the magic formula; 1. Draw first in pencil. 2. Go over the lines in black ink. 3. Fill in all areas with texture and color made from colored pencil.
Today’s essay was inspired by Annette Funicello’s Facebook page. I was marveling at how a teen idol and Disney child star could have such a large following and leave such large footprints on social media when she is not only all grown out of her child-stardom, but is actually quite dead. I, however, who am technically still alive, work very very hard at this author-self-promotion-thingy, and I hardly make any headway at all in the ocean of the internet. So, I did what I always do when faced with the imponderables of this writing life. I drew a picture. I drew Annette naked. Well, that’s not entirely accurate either. I put clothes on her because, well, young-adult-genre authors don’t always have to think like a teenager.
You see, I am not mad at Annette. And my hormones no longer control the other things that once made me deeply regret the fact that Disney never let Annette appear in movies in a bikini, even the movies that were not Disney movies. When you’re twelve, there are different priorities than when you are 58. Hormones don’t do all of my thinking any more… at least, that’s what I tell my wife.
And part of what I still love most about Annette is the music. The Mickey Mouse Club was always about talented kids. They could sing and dance and play the drums, and they were as easily professional quality as many of the adults… and cuter to boot. Talented children have been a significant portion of my life. As an English teacher in middle school, I taught kids that were Annette’s MMC age. I taught them how to write and how to read, and occasionally I had to find other talents to promote and help those kids become winners in the great game of life. And, it may be cruel to say it bluntly, but some kids are downright ugly. Not merely ugly in terms of what they looked like, but how they acted and how they thought and how they felt about things. Racism runs deeply through children who’ve been taught thoroughly by parents before the teacher even meets them. Sometimes you have to dig around really deeply in the black pits of their personalities to find something bright and shiny enough to put the spotlight on. But it is always worth it. ALL CHILDREN HAVE TREASURE BURIED INSIDE THEM. And it deeply hurts that too many adults in every community can’t be bothered to dig for it.
I grafted a background on my picture of Annette to stress the fact that she is not naked in my picture. She was a very public figure and a good portion of her personal treasure was that screen personality that showed through and sparkled in every role. My favorite Annette piece is the movie Babes in Toyland which I saw for the first time at Grandma Beyer’s house in Mason City on her color TV. The songs from that movie still play in my dreams.
The problem, as you can basically see, is the complexity of life on Earth and the convoluted way you have to understand the game to win it. I do not trust the ladders. They are not sturdy. They are not strong. And I fear the snakes. Will they not bite with poison? Will they not encircle me and constrict the very marrow out of my old bones? And when you play the game with M. C., he cheats. He plays in the fourth and fifth dimensions.
It is obvious that I don’t play the game well. You can tell, for instance, that I am struggling to get a camera to take a picture of a pencil drawing and get all of it in focus enough to bring out the nuances. It is the tricks of shading and juxtaposition of bizarre elements that got me the “A+” for this assignment in Drawing 303 at Iowa State University. I couldn’t capture some of the most subtle usage because the paper of the drawing has aged since 1978 and the shading is harder to make stand out against the graying and yellowing paper in the background. And it is increasingly hard to pick the thematic core of my message out of the hoogah-boog and chizzly-goober mishmash of my prose.
But it boils down to this, with school starting again, and money for bills running out, and arguments with the wife, and kids who sleep all day and play computer games all night, the whole two-steps-forward and one-step-back dance that I must do is making the game too hard to play. It is too hard to win. And I must simplify. No more hopping from double planes of existence into a room where you will fall up to the floor from the ceiling. And I must take success where I find it.
Heat of up to 105 and drought returning after months of deluge, makes me take pride in simple steps I have taken in the game. My flower wagon is blossoming only one blossom at a time, but there is bloom… there is success… and flowers seek the sun.
So what does my post for today mean? Don’t worry about it. M.C. Escher cheats when he plays the game. His physics break the laws of physics, and his genius turns around corners that are not really there. And maybe I only scored a “1” on my roll today. But it is a good one. And I have a piece in the game. I am a player on the board. And the next turn will come.
M.C. Escher’s faulty physics.
Catch a Falling Star 