This is an old 1980 Paffooney. I had no particular reason for creating it. I just did it on a whim. It is very Disney inspired and simply silly.
Tag Archives: artwork
Why do they love karaoke in the Philippines?
This is cartoon that I actually got published in a comic book from Ben Dunn’s Ninja High School comic book series. You could look it up. Nobody paid me anything, but maybe it will be a collector’s item some day.
I have been married to a beautiful Filipina for nineteen years now. We have two handsome sons and a beautiful little girl. I am going so far in learning a new culture that I have chosen to learn how to speak that gawd-awful language Tagalog. Salamat. If you gave a chicken monkey-lips and set him to caterwauling, you’d have some idea how Tagalog sounds to a jaded old English ear like mine. I love it. “Flowers” would be “mga blklk” in Tagalog. How beautiful is that? I don’t have to worry about having a sense of humor. They will laugh at me just for my pronunciation.
I am quickly learning also to take part in the most important ritual in Filipino culture. Karaoke. It’s a uniquely oriental thing. Friends and family gather around the TV and start passing around the “magic microphone”, “Magic Mike” for short. Dang! That’ll be my name from now on. Just call me “Magic Mike”! The words appear on the screen in front of rotating still pictures that vary from the aerial view of Mad Ludwig’s German Castle to a beach in Hawaii. The words themselves have been placed there by some Japanese or Korean guy who barely knows how to speak English. He apparently sits in his Tokyo apartment all day listening to American CD’s and trying to write the words down exactly as his Samurai brain slowly processes them. The grammar is always twisted and goofy, many of the words are wrong. The mistakes on the screen can throw me way off singing one of my favorite songs when it gets to the part about “birds is flying over the rainbow, so why won’t I?” Ah! The total comic artistry! And get this, the machine scores the performance. You can hit the most cat-strangling, nails on blackboards sort of notes, and if you hit the beat right, it gives you a 94 and calls you a star singer. Sinatra is turning over in his grave. Barbara Streisand will be turning over in her grave too as soon as my singing kills her.
Don’t get me wrong. As silly a thing as karaoke is, I love it. It makes me feel good to belt out a round of “I did it my way”. I sing better than some of our friends. But, we have some real singing talent join us on occasion. James is smoother and more polished singing a Beatles tune than the Beatles themselves. Ernie sings “Beautiful Sunday” so well it brings a tear to my eye. And of course, there’s nothing that tickles me more than hearing a Filipino tenor putting his all into “My Wild Irish Rose”.
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Teaching Los Vatos Locos
I have spent the majority of my teaching career teaching Spanish speakers in South Texas. So, believe me when I say that for a gringo like me, there has to be some kind of art to it. I have taught so many surly, excessively macho boys and very feminine, but definitely aggressive girls, that I think I may have found an insight or two on how to do it.
First, you must be brave. And you must recognize that bravery means remaining outwardly calm while on the inside your heart is pounding wildly and you are fighting not to wet your pants. My first year we had to walk our eighth grade boys to and from the cafeteria four blocks away on another campus. I, being a rookie teacher, was given the delightful job of forcing the two most evil vato locos (crazy dudes) to return to classes and schoolwork after lunch instead of wandering off for the afternoon. I had to face down El Mouse and El Talan and convince them to catch up to the rest of the class without killing me. I have to say, at that point I did not have a forceful personality and could not give the laser eye of death that all South Texas teachers need to develop. I didn’t make the mistake of saying please, but implied I could actually do something to them to make their lives more miserable if they didn’t let themselves be herded along like cattle. El Talan picked up a metal fence post as if it was a baseball bat, and I got the chance to review my whole short life for a few tense seconds. But they relented. I didn’t show fear, and they put down the post and sauntered on with their lives. I got them back to the corral for afternoon classes. Both of them went to prison after dropping out of school. Both of them are dead now. One was killed by a rival drug dealer. I made the mistake of telling that tale to my mother. At the time, she nearly submitted my resignation for me.
Second, I learned you must have a heart. Veteran teachers told me that I should not smile before winter break, and even then, I should only smile at students’ misfortunes. That advice turned out to be a vat of puppy doo. I learned early on that students are people. They have feelings. They will return what they get. Unfortunately they often dish out what they get from other teachers, from parents, and even from local law enforcement. But more than once I was given a kid that everyone else said was a bad kid, and I treated that kid like a human bean… er, I mean being… and was forever after that kid’s favorite teacher, and someone that they would do anything for. I was one of those teachers who kids return to visit. Faces would appear in my doorway often like so many blooming flowers, blossoms lit up with sunshine. They would be high school kids who came back to get an encouraging word, or graduates coming by to tell me how successful they were. Often they came because of something they remembered from class. They felt they had to share their sunshine. Believe me, sometimes it was vital to me to be able to continue to get a little of that sunlight in the midst of daily darkness.
I have to confess, I did not reach every kid. Some have made poor choices and died from them. Some have turned to the dark side of the force and are unrepentantly Darth Vader. Some I could not stand and did everything in my power to extinguish their bad behaviors with punishments that never worked. Some that I could not stand were among the ones that came back to visit too. Funny how you can do everything you possibly can to defeat a kid, and they will still come around, still tell you that you were their favorite teacher, and the only thing they remembered about middle school was something that happened in your classroom. It’s not even always something you want them to remember.
The kid in today’s Paffooney was not one of the bad ones. Manuel was the son of a border patrol agent. He was smart. He knew what was right and what was wrong. I don’t know where he is now, or what he is doing, but I believe in him, and I know he was worth every effort I ever put into teaching him.
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Old Oil
Today’s Paffooney is an oil painting I did in the 1980’s. It is an attempt to prove to myself that I could paint realistically enough to call myself a surrealist. I know you may think that last sentence is a mix of oxymoron and just plain moron, but it is necessary to have the REAL in place in the middle of the surrealism. I chose to make it from photographs. I used a picture of myself and David (a child who was my student, but taught me more than I taught him) with another photo of a building that my grandparents had taken a vacation picture in front of from Tombstone, Arizona. It was important to get the light right. I wanted to establish a dramatic light source in the upper right of the picture and bathe the scene in sunlight.
As a self portrait this works because it shows a lot of what I am as a teacher. I willingly wear the black hat. I am a cowboy. I shoot from the hip, in the sense that I actually teach stuff that’s in the literature book instead of doing test-preparation worksheets. I teach because I actually care about kids, not because I’m greedy for the fantastic salary they offer to Texas teachers, especially one that is willing to teach in a poor rural community where most of the kids are Hispanic, under-fed, and under-loved by the people who run this lovely business-friendly State.
The boy in the picture is one who didn’t have a father living at home, whose mother was always working, and who never got a break from the social workers, police, and other school personnel. I had a very progressive and wonderful principal at the time who knew I’d studied to be a foster parent in case of need and knew that other boys had been successfully mentored by me. He suggested I keep an eye on David and help him out when no one else could. It was David who taught me that if you feed a child like him (I was a lousy cook but I could make hamburgers and mashed potatoes) they will continually show up at your door like a stray cat. I was single at the time. It was a bit risky to let a child into my home where people might think I was some kind of child-molester. But I kept the apartment windows open, hid nothing from anybody, helped him with homework (if I could get him to do any), and played computer games and role-playing games with him. I took him to the doctor a couple of times. I listened when he needed to talk about things, and he was my friend until he graduated high school. Now he is married with children of his own. I haven’t seen him in over sixteen years, but I know that skinny little mosquito-sized boy has grown into a big healthy, well-fed man. It is important in life, and in oil paintings, to make a difference for someone else. He made a difference for me. Notice how he uses his rabbit-ear fingers to keep me humble in my self-portrait.
As a composition, even though this is a realistic picture, it works because of numerous rectangles that stack and pile and lead the eye into the depths of the background while the strong diagonals made by shadows, arms, and edges not only draw you to the center of the picture, but bring the figure of the boy and I closer together than we are in the actual image. Layers of reality, carefully composed, to capture and portray… That last sentence is a three line poem to explain what an oil painting really is… or maybe what it SURreally is.
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Metaphor and Meaning
In this week’s Paffooney remix, I have pictured the little boy crooner Francois Martin on the main street of Norwall. Why have I done such a foolish thing? Why have I drawn a boy singing silently a song that only I can hear in my silly old head? In fact, why do I label them Cantos instead of Chapters? Of course, the answer to these rhetorical questions is metaphorical. I look at my writing as being poetry, or, more accurately, as music rather than mere prose. It is a metaphor central to my being, writing is putting the inner music of my mind down on paper.
Here is a secret to powerful writing. Connect ideas with metaphors. A metaphor is a direct comparison of two unlike things to create an analogy, an echo of an idea that gives resonance to a notion. Sorry, I’m an English teacher. It’s in my genes. But metaphors can serve as the essential connections, as glue to put paragraphs and scenes together.
Let me show you a metaphor. Here is a short poem, the natural environment where many metaphors live;
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.
The central metaphor of this poem is comparing the cookie to my life. I am getting older. I have six incurable diseases, some of them life threatening. I have been thinking about mortality a lot lately. So what is the point of the poem? That even when the last bite is taken, and there is no more cookie… when I am dead, there is the memory of me. Not my memory. The memory of me in the minds of my family, my children, my students, and other people who have come to know me. That memory makes whatever goodness that is in me worth living for.
Okay, a metaphor explained is kinda like a bug that’s been dissected for a science fair. Its innards are revealed and labeled. The beauty is gone. It’s kinda icky.
What works better, is a metaphor that the readers can readily grasp on their own. The beauty has to be discovered, not dissected and explained. Let me try again;
The Boy and the Boat
The boy looked to the horizon where wild and wooly white-caps roiled upon the sea.
“Lord help me,” he said, “the sea is so large, and my boat is so small…”
I can hear what you are thinking. “That’s too simple and ordinary. If it’s a metaphor, then it’s a really stupid one.” Well, I heard someone thinking that, even if it was not you.
Let me add a bit of information to help you connect things as I do. When I was ten years old, a fifteen-year-old neighbor boy sexually assaulted me. I told no one. I was so devasted by the event that I repressed the memory until I reached the age of twenty two. In high school, my suicidal thoughts and darkest depressions were caused by this event even though I couldn’t even recall. To this day I have not explained to mother and father what happened. I can only bring myself to tell you now because my abuser died of heart failure last summer. It was a life event of overwhelming darkness, pain, and soul scorching. Now look at “The Boy and the Boat” again. Has the meaning changed for you the way it does for me?
Now, I know that the last paragraph was a totally unfair use of harsh reality to make a point about metaphor and meaning. So let me give you one last poem… a sillier one. You can make of it whatever you will;
The Grin
The wrinkly, bewhiskered old man
Had a smile like a plate of moldy spaghetti
In the afternoon sun.
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Snow Babies (Proof that I’m not a loser as a writer)
My novel Snow Babies that I submitted to Chanticleer Book Reviews for the Dante Rossetti Awards for Young Adult Fiction has been awarded a place among thirty-one finalists. Here is the link; http://chantireviews.com/chanticleer-contest-deadlines-and-announcement-projections/finalists-for-the-dante-rossetti-awards-for-young-adult-fiction/
I should know by the end of January if I win or not, but the fact that I made the finals feels like vindication!
Above you see the mock-up cover that I drew for myself. (The novel was submitted as an unpublished manuscript). Here is another Paffooney with the main character of Snow Babies, Valerie Clarke.
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Wise Guy
At school today the principal asked us to come up with one word that we wanted to apply to our own lives as teachers. You know how the teaching game is. You start a new semester; you have to be subjected to eight hours of blah-blah-blah. It is required blah-blah-blah mandated by Texas education laws. My magic word was wisdom.
So, what does wisdom imply? Well, I am old. I should have some of that thing in one pocket or another. So I search my pockets. As a kid I vowed to become a wizard. What is a wizard if not a wise man? A wise guy. How, then, do you acquire wisdom?
In the movie Mystery Men, Ben Stiller tells us that mystical wisdom from the wise guy mystical sage is only saying a thing is its opposite. Thus true wisdom comes from learning how foolish you really are. It’s a good joke, but it’s also true. You can’t be wise unless you realize how little you actually know out of all the things that there are.
Why would I want to be wise? Well, I have the fool thing down pretty well already. As fools go, I’m a humble fool who trades in foolishness and calls it humor and young adult novels. So it follows, by logic, an advanced form of foolishness, that I must be wise.
Okay, wise guy, time to say something wise in the conclusion… Doh!
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Teachers Must Fail (Educational Ruminations about Ruination)
The fact is, being a teacher is the same as accepting the necessity of failure. Yes, I know it is a sort of metaphorical nightmare to say that, and I don’t mean that I am planning to give F’s to kids. I would prefer never to fail a kid, because it means I failed the kid. Failure is, however, the ruling factor in teaching.
In my teaching Paffooney which I call “Reluctant Rabbit Teaches a Few Good Notes”, you see me as a teacher with my pack of very diverse and desk-hopping students doing what I do best. I teach reading by making them read, reading with them and to them, helping them to ask questions about what they read and never answering those questions for them (after all, they learn better if they do the work rather than having me do the work for them). I teach them to write by reading what they write and responding to it, and by writing myself and sharing that with them too. Reluctant Rabbit teaches in these two ways by using his giant magic pencil of cartoons and music to create the Great Symphony of Learning. It turns out that teaching like this is often considered a subversive act.
But teaching is all about failure. In Texas Education, the powers that be have constructed a system of education designed specifically to make teachers fail. It really began with Mark White as Governor and H. Ross Perot as the mad troll of education. Back then they decided to get rid of incompetent and idiot teachers by giving State-wide teacher idiot tests. They gave us basic reading and writing tests to determine if we were worthy to keep our jobs. I remember trying to comfort a very wonderful Hispanic Science teacher who was worried that her language skills would take away the job she loved. But what they didn’t realize about teaching is that if a teacher is not basically competent, then the students will eat them. Teaching in the classroom will remove the incompetent teacher (though not necessarily the ineffective one).
When George Bush and then Emperor-for-Life Rick Perry took over the drive to make teachers fail, they added the notion that you had to give students idiot tests and punish their teachers for the fact that students are naturally immature and basically idiots. Teaching became less about learning stuff and more about idiot-transformation. Stamp out idiocy by teaching them how to pass the idiot tests.
When we reached the point we were about to master the TAAS test (Texas Assessment of Donkey-hole Students), the State decided they had to change to the TAKS test (Texas Assessment of Kooky Stuff). We closed in on mastering TAKS, and the State quickly switched to End-Of-Course STAAR Tests (Stupid Teachers Aren’t About to Rejoice). What has been the point of all this testing? It is like trying to measure your child’s growth with a ruler that is constantly getting bigger. No matter how much progress you make, it will look like the child is shrinking. This, of course, is exactly the goal of this red State’s education system. Public schools have to fail so the Republican masters of profit can privatize and make schools run for profit (except for poor people’s schools which are intended to properly prepare poor people for prison).
It breaks my heart, but schools are increasingly places for boosting the rich and busting the poor. Schools that have high poverty populations, like the schools I have worked for, are left to struggle and die on their own, grinding up young and idealistic teachers as well as old and cancerously cynical teachers that don’t believe in following the rules. My State is not the only State trying to do away with a free and valuable public education.
Consider the case of Ruben, one of my students I once tried to help and simply couldn’t save. Ruben was a skinny Hispanic fourteen-year-old who wasn’t living with his parents. He bounced from grandparents to aunts to uncles and back again. He was extremely bright and fiercely independent. But he wouldn’t do schoolwork and didn’t seem to care if he was dooming himself to a lifetime in the seventh grade.
A boy from a better household, a more privileged boy, began picking on Ruben. I caught Victor pushing Ruben around and trying to goad him into a fight, a fight he knew he could win because he was bigger, heavier, and training to be a Gold Gloves boxer.
“What can I do to help, Ruben?” I asked.
“No stupid gringo can do anything to help. I can fight my own battles.”
He had a point. I could stop the behavior from happening in school, but once he left campus, I had no authority and the police didn’t figure it was a police matter. So, what would the outcome be?
Ruben took care of the problem by joining a gang. The Town Freaks in San Antonio was actually a local chapter of the Bloods from Los Angeles. They would go on to become the San Antonio Kingz. When Ruben was being initiated into the gang, they stole a pickup truck in South San Antonio. They got into a car chase with the police. The truck rolled over under an overpass and everyone in the back of the truck was killed. Ruben was one of those.
It still makes me weep to write about it, or even think about it. If I had had any resources at all to help that boy… If I could have … Why did I have to fail? But blaming myself never gives me any comfort. I learned to do whatever I could to help kids stay away from gangs, to learn in ways that were painless, and be able to talk to an adult instead of trying to handle everything themselves. I mentored a number of fatherless boys, or boys who had alcoholic fathers and mothers, poor kids who had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. We played computer games and Dungeons and Dragons, replaced by a science fiction role playing game when the Baptists objected to the original game. I was even accused and investigated as a possible child molester because so many boys visited my apartment before I got married. Of course, the authorities found out the truth (some of them knew before I was accused) and were a little bit embarrassed to be asking me such questions when so many people were willing to come to my defense. I learned to dream the impossible dream. You can actually save a kid from poverty and self-doubt. One of my boys went to Notre Dame University. Another went into the Marines and specialized in intelligence. I recently learned that a couple of my former students have become teachers for the same school I labored at for over twenty-three years .
Okay, Mr. Rabbit, you have tooted your own horn, now. Are you going to tell us that teachers don’t ultimately fail?
Sorry, I’m afraid that they do. I am facing the end of my teaching career now. With diabetes, arthritis, hypertension, and three more incurable diseases, I am trying to teach with diminishing energy, making a forty-five minute commute to my school across north Dallas twice every day that is going to kill me, and skills that are becoming somewhat shaky in the face of stress at work. I am human. I will not last much longer. The State is busy trying to reduce the retirement that after thirty-one years I think I deserve. It isn’t enough money to keep my family going as it is.
And part of that failure is not entirely bad. A new generation is bound to take over and carry on. As I diminish, someone will rise up to take up the torch. In fact, I need to vacate my position so someone who needs a classroom to start their career can begin to learn how to reach out to the Rubens they will encounter. So, I apologize for promising humor and then trying to make you cry. I probably only succeeded in bringing myself to tears. Teachers ultimately fail just as all men eventually die, but the War on Ignorance is not yet over, and we will never have to admit defeat.
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The Surrealist Manifesto (Second Edition)
(This, dear viewer, is called “Portrait from the Jungle”. Three images from 1980 magazines put together in a surrealist manner. It’s intentionally kinda creepy… that is of course why there is a chicken in it. Chickens creep me out.)
The Surrealist Manifesto ; or Why I have to Juxtapose Silly Stuff to Make Meaning by Mishmashing
To begin with, you have to picture me as a seventeen-year-old geeky kid in High School Art Class in 1974. Yes, I was four-eyed, but not with the cool round granny glasses, but the black horn-rims that were not only cheaper, but much more dramatically out of date and out of favor with my peers. I was a participant in Art 3, a class that meant I was an Art nerd for the third time in only three years of high school. Yes, I could draw well, and all the girls cooed in their sexy cheerleader voices, “Ooh, I just hate you because you can draw so darn good.” And I would blush because it sounded like praise, even though you may notice they actually said they hated me.
Now that you have that awful image foremost in the inner eye of imagination, I can reveal that that was the year I discovered the work of Salvador Dali. Yes, that’s right, the dumb old melted watches guy with the handlebar mustache that looked like he’d taken a pencil sharpener to both ends. The melted watches, naked people with all their parts grotesquely stretched out and draped over stuff, and a soft sculpture that would thoroughly disgust anybody with baked beans scattered all around the foreground. These were the elements of what was called the surrealist movement. Surrealism, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia, is filled with the element of surprise, unexpected juxtaposition, and non sequitur. Silly old Andre Breton, the founder and chief sayer-of-what-is-true about surrealism, said that first of all it is a revolutionary movement. Now, I grew up in a determinedly Republican and conservative household in North Central Iowa. I had to look up juxtaposition in the dictionary just to know what the heck they were talking about. Back then, of course, I used Webster’s, not Wikipedia. I stood to lose significant portions of the hide on my behind if my family discovered I was using my swiftly enlarging and apparently all-knowing high school brain to investigate revolutionary ideas! In fact, if I had realized that political surrealism had an affinity for both Freud and Communism, I probably would have closed the book on it myself. Still, I was swept away.
I entered college a few years later convinced that my revolutionary art ideas were going to galvanize the world around me, that world being Cow College, otherwise known as Iowa State University. I was going to revolutionize the novel form by writing everything about my little home town in Iowa and doing it in full color, comic book style panel cartoons. My heroes would be small town people who took on the greatest of all issues in modern life and tackled them so brilliantly that it would create world peace, make universal happiness without the use of drugs, and be such great art that it would put my name in the art books right beside Salvador and Rene Magritte. People would be studying my work for years to come.
This was the point in life in which I created some of my best characters, the Bicycle-Wheel Genius who shunned modern technology and created his own pedal-powered helicopter, the hippy hobo who wore a coat of many colors sewn together from pieces of patchwork quilts and ultimately knew the most important secrets of life, the universe, and everything, and of course, the numerous fools and clowns that would put Shakespeare’s Touchstone, Falstaff, and Bottom to shame. I was going to revolutionize story-telling in cartoons!
As you know, someone else invented the graphic novel. I don’t even know for sure that I had the idea first. Probably not. And, with my lifetime of luck reminiscent of Joe Btfsplk, I developed arthritis at the age of 18 and had to curb my obsession with drawing comics.
So, a thirty year career as a middle school and high school English teacher taught me that life is a series of surprises, juxtapositions of an unexpected variety, and non sequiturs. Where had I heard that before? Ah, yes! I had realized that life is an exercise in surrealism. Therefore, now that I am finally on track to become the story-teller that I set out to be, I will be a surrealist. I will take the surreal bull by his electric pink and curly-cued horns and say, “Whoa, kitty-kitty, don’t permafrost this old wombat!” Why will I say that? Is it to be a surrealist like Dali? Heavens to murgatroid, Baba Louie! Of course it is!
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