This oil painting reflects my love of the Native American culture of spirituality and connection to the natural world. Behind Wakanhca (the Magic Man or shaman), his young daughter has been bathing and is confronted with a glowing stag. Lightning in the background confirms that this is a lightning dream of a spirit animal. I used images that were as authentically Dakota Sioux as my silly old German-American brain could manage.
Honestly, this is my brazen attempt at goopy self-promotion. If you do an image search on the word Paffooney, you come up with mostly my artwork, and, inexplicably, pictures of women named Valerie Clarke. (Valerie is the name of the heroine in my novel Snow Babies, but I honestly never put that name in a tag or a category.) So if you’d like to see, Google it. (“Google it” almost sounds like a Paffooney term itself, doesn’t it?)
Once again a little ice is on the roads and we miss a day of school. And on a State testing day! Today was supposed to be one of the very last TAKS tests. High stakes tests in this State were intended from the beginning to make us fail and prove that public schools are unworkable. The powers that be want to take public education money away to use for private schools and for-profit schemes. They think of education as a commodity meant only for those who can afford it. The stone-age thinking among rich Texans has iced us over. So, I sit at home impotent and waiting to hear how we will proceed. We have to get educating again or the dinosaurs are going to eat us.
In the early 90’s I created a comic strip called Hidden Kingdom. It was about three inch fairies, pixies, and creatures that live among us and have their own kingdoms and empires hidden in our world. They, of course, were of a size that allowed them to use creatures like chickens as riding beasts. That is the source of the idea behind this Paffooney. The fairy princess and her bug-boy servant are taking a ride.
This post is going to sound an awful lot like stuff and nonsense, because that is what it primarily is, but it had to be said anyway. Last night my family took me to see the movie Saving Mr. Banks, a deeply moving biographical story of P.L. Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, and how she had to be convinced to surrender her beloved character to the movie industry which she so thoroughly detested and distrusted. It is also about one of my most important literary heroes, Walt Disney, and how he eventually convinced the very eccentric and complicated authoress to allow him to make her beloved character into a memorable movie icon.
“We create our stories to rewrite our own past,” says Disney, trying to tell Mrs. Travers how he understood the way that her Mary Poppins character completed and powerfully regenerated the tragedy of her own father’s dissolution and death. This is the singular wisdom of Disney. He took works of literature that I loved and changed them, making them musical, making them happy, and making them into the cartoonish versions of themselves that so many of us have come to cherish from our childhoods. He transforms history, and he transforms memory, and by doing so, he transforms truth.
Okay, and as silly as those insights are, here’s a sillier one. In H.P. Lovecraft’s dreamlands, on the shores of the Cerenarian Sea, north of the Mountains of Madness, there roam three clowns. They are known as the Boz, the Diz, and the Bard, nicknames for Charles Dickens, Walt Disney, and William Shakespeare. These three clowns, like the three fates of myth, measure and cut the strings of who we are, where we are going, and how we will get there. They come to Midgard, the Middle Earth to help us know wisdom and folly, the wisdom of fools.
Why have I told you these silly, silly things? Do I expect you to believe them? Do I even expect you to read all the way to paragraph four? Ah, sadly, no… but I am thinking and recording these thoughts because I believe they are important somehow. I may yet use them as the basis of a book of my own. I enjoy a good story because it helps me to do precisely as Mr. Disney has said, I can rewrite my own goofy, silly, pointless past.
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Yesterday I may not have fully explained about the Bond villain-esque villain that I have deployed into the dark waters of my manuscript novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius. Snowboy is not fully human, but he is trying. He was a robot built by a joint American-Alien project in Area 51. He was created as a living weapon and deployed against the brother-in-law of the Bicycle-Wheel Genius himself.
During the course of the story his robot brain is turned off by sudden electro-magnetic trauma, and the scientist is able to piece him back together in the form of a boy. But he’s not a normal boy in any way. His nuclear core malfunctioned and caused his cooling units to ice him over, making him a living Snowboy.
What makes him the villain is his determination to torment and destroy those people who gave him his resurrected life. He has emotions for the first time in his life, and he totally misuses them. His internal struggle with the truths of life translates into destructive treatment of others.
Okay, I know it doesn’t all make sense. I’m still working on it. But it gives me an excuse to show you another picture of him, this time with a less washed out photo of the drawing.
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Right now in my writing I am in need of a sinister villain. The story I am writing, The Bicycle-Wheel Genius, is the story of a super genius who has lost all the people he loves in a terrible fire caused by a lab accident. The themes of the book include that human beings are inherently good. Another theme is that those good human beings need other human beings, friends, family, acquaintances, experts, clowns, entertainers and those people who will ultimately help a person define himself and become the person he or she is meant to be. The science fiction in the story includes instances of time travel, electro-magnetics, genetic manipulations of age and even species, alien encounters, and robots who are nearly human.
So how do I make a good villain to support stuff like that? Villains are by definition not good. They pervert the basic nature of human beings to serve their own selfish ends. Goldfinger uses his financial and technical genius to defeat James Bond and enrich himself with Fort Knox’s gold. Of course, he’s a bad guy, so the good guy, Bond, defeats him. Moriarty is a dastardly villain who tries to outthink and outwit Sherlock Holmes for the selfish satisfaction of beating Sherlock, possibly to prove himself the most intelligent force in the universe. Of course, he’s also a bad guy, and when both he and Sherlock plunge over the waterfall, only Sherlock survives to be victorious.
My villain has to be so caught up with self benefit, that he must be willing to pervert goodness and cause others to suffer and die. What better villain, then, to use other than the government assassin robot that the genius rebuilds into a pseudo-replica of his own son? And because of his robotic, soulless nature, violent government assassin programming, and human elements introduced by his re-animator, he becomes a philosophical and existential mess. The assassin Crackerbutton is transformed into a boy-robot whose cooling unit overcompensates for loss of mass and turns him into the Snowboy. Okay, I know I should explain why he’s evil and how things work out, but forgive me if I save that for my book. In a selfish and perverted way, I am seeking to entice you into buying that book and reading that book to see if the Mickey-villain stands any chance at all of being what I am claiming it to be.
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Sometimes I think of a Paffooney as a cartoon poem. Such is this one. I drew it a long time ago when I went through a quasi-religious phase and imagined myself turning inward as the Asian religions do.
Sleeping Beauty
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.
Love poetry is basically nonsense. Fueled by hormones and lust, dreams and assumptions, it is never real. It is only a vision, an apparition, and fools you into believing what could never be real. So why write it? Because it is in our nature, in our stars, to love. Just because something is foolish, or impossible to pin down, there is no reason to give up on it. That’s what the Paffooney faeries are for. They cast faery light on what you should never believe, but always, always do.
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So, here is one secret recipe for baking a Paffooney with some humor in the process.
Step 1 : First you have to get a stupid idea and draw a witless drawing of it on a nice fresh piece of paper. Here the Princess is holding step one, a portrait of what I believe Valerie Clarke, the main character of Snow Babies might look like. She is supposed to be the most beautiful little girl who ever lived in Norwall, a small Iowa farm town.
Step 2 : Then you must get a good digital picture of it. Here I used the Princess as a makeshift picture stand and took the picture in sunlight muted by clouds.
Step 3 : I must then remove all clutter and background from the image using the big old eraser thingy on the Microsoft computer paint program. sometimes I need to erase pixel by pixel until I am thoroughly pixelated.
Step 4 : This gets me ready to use my handy-dandy cheap-o photo program (I always wanted to use both handy-dandy and cheap-o photo in the same sentence! Item 128 on my bucket list.) I can layer the image over any of a number of stolen and parolin’ background photos.
And so, I thus become a pretend world-renowned unknown clown artist with a penchant for multiple uses of internal rhymes as well as multiple uses of the same boring, wretched sketches.
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Catch a Falling Star 