So I would not be a master*

With nearly every illustration — from doodle to finished piece for pay — I can remember exactly where I was, what I saw, heard, felt during its creation.

Something about the moment infuses the art, or absorbs into the myelin around my illustrating nerves, or something.

I sat on the deck outside my in-laws' trailer in southern Oregon when I drew this, almost entirely with a ballpoint pen. I'm sure you can appreciate how tedious it is to create solid masses with ballpoint pen, but I was far away from my usual drawing tools, and made lemonade out of lemons to fashion the raw naive look I wanted.

Daylight died by the time I had finished with all the links in the chains that comprise this ghoul's hair, making a dense bed on which to lay the type.

Once home from the brief trip to visit my wife's folks, I brought the image into my computer and added flourishes and color digitally.

The first go-round aimed at tightly
cropped,realistic images of the
conflicting dynamics that
enable slavery.

Victims are sought by many
interests for many reasons.

It was the culmination of a long and challenging give-and-take with editors and designers at the UC Davis Magazine to illustrate a story on the crisis of modern slavery.

The article's point: Slavery continues and grows largely because slavers can profit richly from it — and because often families conclude no other economic choice but to sell off their members.

The images went through a number of iterations, which I welcomed because two of those directing the art, Jan Conroy and Laurie Lewis, were my instructors for a graphic design program at University Extension through UC Davis (that'd be Career 2.1), and they sped me along with considered insights and fun assignments.

The challenge for this assignment was to portray that gut-punching dichotomy of economic benefit to slavers and families/communities. At first I tried more literal interpretations, thinking sepia ink wash and pen to show realistic bodies being tormented, literally pushed and pulled to symbolize the complex factors that enable slavery (above).

Then I sought more stylized visual metaphors, like this (right) and these (below):

I twisted the tools and trademarks of slavery into something more twisted, depicting slaves in new ways as commodities, as targets.

Here are some more:

Punishment collars became targets, slaves forged their own chains, took all the risk for their own doomed journeys, pulled along and pulled along by false hope that rescue would come.

Along the way, they lost themselves and became the product of work, someone's profit.

The limpid eyes in this sketch held inspiration for drawings to come …

After a lengthy discussion (lengthy for me and my art, anyway; I often get a laundry list of changes, but in this case the editors were discussing with me the philosophical reasons for wanting changes), the editors said, essentially, "Twist harder."

The editors wanted me to strip down the issue to a visceral level, to the base message of profit for oppression.

A big fan of illustrator (now sculptor) David Suter, I found this story fertile for visual puns; not funny ha ha!, but creating a primary message that encrypts a second, truer message, of which Suter was a master.



The slaves-for-cash sketch above got remade (in a crudely imperfect fashion) into a ghoulish face (left), for example.

Then a throwaway sketch, of people literally stepping over faceless others, opened up new possibilities. What if I could turn the negative spaces into "hidden" statements?

I see dead people in the negative spaces …

Scraping away as much as I could, until the figures were barely recognized as human (big, scrawled circles with big empty, strangely drawn eyes), I turned the figures into kinds of puzzle pieces I could turn and stretch to create negative spaces among them. This (below) …

… became this:

Slaves go one way, money the other, all become upside-down death …

and the cover art, above.

In the following issue, the magazine ran this letter:

I truly enjoy receiving my UC Davis Magazine. However, your recent publication depicted a truly unpleasant and downright awful illustration on its cover. Aside from the fact that the artistic ability is grade school quality, I question whether the article itself is a proper subject to feature in a magazine that has been to date generally uplifting.

Grove Bolles ’81
Lehi, Utah

Oh well. At least Mr. Bolles gave a thought to my illustration, and that thought produced enough energy to become a letter (I hope a snail mail letter, with an affixed stamp) to share his consideration with others. More consideration, I suppose, than much of my work gets. Or merits.

* As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy. — Abraham Lincoln

Where have you gone, Andres Torres?

Old sap doodling about a time before
his time, a time that never was …

Baseball is myth, and myth is humans trying to make sense. Baseball is childhood, fun at the heart of grief. Baseball is story.

About this, I'm in the naive minority.

To most, baseball is math. Statistics drive dollars, dollars fuel victories, though not necessarily the victories we naifs expect, namely the World Series. Money rules; baseball is business. I realize now, so late, that Albert Pujols, the St. Louis Cardinals' too-good-to-be-true first baseman, is duty-bound to expect and accept the highest salary in history, so that some future Pujols can do likewise, ad infinitum.

Were I Albert Pujols, I would have realized long, long ago that I made more than I could possibly need, and would seek a lesser salary now as Free Agent No. 1. But to do so would cause the market for professional athletes everywhere to implode, and the math-driven dreams to dry up forever.

[Pujols fulfilled his role in grand style today, taking a 10-year deal with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim; it means two things: (1) he doesn't mind playing for the most awkwardly named team in U.S. pro sports and (2) he will demonstrate the baseball law of diminishing returns as his power recedes drastically by year three of his contract.]

When legend becomes fact,
sketch the legend.

Math trumped myth, as it always will, once again this week: the San Francisco Giants traded Andres Torres. Had he played for the Giants a decade or so ago, he might have been called one of the Fighting Hydrants — small-statured, amazingly athletic, relentless, old-school crowd favorites.

Torres is among my all-time favorites who lives a wonderful story, which includes finally finding a way to control his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder so he could focus on playing centerfield and hitting home runs. Hit or miss, Torres play full out. He even lets errant pitches go by with great energy, snapping back like a torero taunting the bull.

Torres broke through the season before last, the Giants' championship season, and well deserved the Willie Mac Award he earned for exemplifying spirit and leadership, after Giants Hall of Famer Willie McCovey. Last season Torres was lousy. Many say the championship year, Torres especially, was a fluke. I wanted so badly for Torres to prove the real fluke was last year. I still do, even as he moves to the Mets.

Salary aside, Torres is the ideal athlete. Triumphantly gifted, he sometimes performs game-saving feats. But he frequently fails spectacularly, too, in front of 42,000 paying fans and hundreds of thousands on the other side of the cameras. Often the harder he tries, the more likely he fails, flailing at pitches one would think he had learned by now to lay off. But Torres charges into the next new day, hoping, planning for better.

[Also, the Giants traded a good pitcher, Ramon Ramirez, to the Mets, and gave up on signing outfielders Cody Ross and Carlos Beltran. The wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'; I don't know where I'll be tomorrow …]

Now I do as before, make myth out of majority rule. New promising players whom I should know, but don't, will fill the roster, and I'll look for the stories among the numbers, and hang onto the stories until they break my heart again. It took me years to return to the Giants after Will Clark and Matt Williams left.

I'm not so stubborn as before.

Unworthy offspring of the Greatest Generation

Seventy years ago tomorrow, five of my mom's uncles, the Fahlgren brothers, somehow survived the Date Which Will Live in Infamy — the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Empire of Japan, that plunged the United States into World War II.

Vern, Ervin, Glen, Warner and Gordon
Fahlgren, all served the Navy at
Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941

The date … the horrible war … the immense sacrifices by people stateside … the incomprehensible triumphs that came of a nation working as one … all dim at an alarming pace as the world twists on itself and we become removed by time.

The brothers in San Diego

The Fahlgren men are my grandmother Irene Gibson's brothers, of which she had seven. The oldest, Gordon, joined the Navy with brothers Warner and Vern in February 1941. Leonard joined the Army a month later. Brothers Glen and Ervin joined the Navy in July. Carl, the youngest, was turned down for military service.

Three of the Fahlgrens were assigned to Pearl Harbor: Gordon to the USS Vestal, a repair ship; Warner to the battleship USS Oklahoma; and Vern to the destroyer USS Hovey. At the brothers' urging, their mother — my great-grandmother, Theresa Fahlgren Lindstrom — asked the Navy to assign all her sons to the Vestal.

My great grandmother, Theresa Lindstrom,
christens the USS Susquehanna

Admiral Chester Nimitz said yes, and complimented the boys' mother for her patriotism, sending six sons into the service. In 1942, the Navy honored her patriotism by having her christen the tanker USS Susquehanna out of Tacoma, Wash.

(I'm getting all this information, by the way, from an account great-Uncle Glen had written for his family. The Billings Gazette based its own story, commemorating the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, on Glen's report. The Fahlgren boys grew up in far northern Montana.)

The Vestal was readying for war, its welders sealing the portholes of all the warships in the harbor. It tied up to the USS Arizona Dec. 5 to begin work on her. The Fahlgren brothers took liberty Dec. 6, returning to the Vestal at midnight.

Glen arose before dawn Dec. 7, 1941. A baker, he was preparing coffee cake and pumpkin pies, when after daybreak the Vestal's officers began shouting at sailors to man their stations. Glen emerged from the galley to see smoke rising from the Arizona, and a Japanese plane diving toward the Arizona and strafing the Vestal with machine gun fire. The Vestal's anti-aircraft gun jammed immediately in the fight, the commander and some of the crew struggling mightily to get it working again.

A bullet hit Vern, and shrapnel struck a ship's cook. Their chief master-at-arms was killed instantly. Minutes later, a Japanese bomb raced through the mess hall, 20 feet from where the brothers stood, the concussion knocking them flat. Another bomb at the same time plowed all the way through the Vestal and destroyed its rudder. Sailors used axes to sever the lines mooring the Vestal to the burning Arizona. A Navy tug later pulled the listing Vestal away and shoved it into shallow water to keep it from sinking.

When the Arizona's forward ammunition magazines detonated from the blast of a final, fatal Japanese bomb, the force blew the Vestal's commander and many sailors and Marines overboard. Before the commander — covered in oil — could swim aboard again and rescind it, an order to abandon ship had already been given by the executive officer. While Glen took advantage of a lull to look for his brothers — coming upon the body of a sailor blown onto his ship from the Arizona — Gordon, Vern and Warner had already gone into the water.

Gordon made it back to the ship after the attack. Vern and Warner went missing for days, and all became separated. None knew until days later that they each had been put on guns along the harbor's beaches, bracing for more Japanese attacks which did not come. I never heard — or forgot if someone told me — what became of great-Uncle Vern's wound.

The five Fahlgren brothers served together again aboard the Vestal, which was eventually returned to service in April 1942, until November of that year, when the five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, Iowa, all died with the sinking of the light cruiser USS Juneau. After that, the Navy prohibited so many siblings from serving together. The Fahlgren brothers were scattered about the Navy, and after the war came home safely.

They did exactly what we imagine men and women did after serving in and surviving World War II. Having helped save the world from evil, they came home and carried the United States onward and upward. All went to their homes, assumed their roles in their communities, raised their families, fulfilled the promises they forged by their sacrifice and their witness to horror. I don't know that they even talked much about their time at war; I really don't know much about them, to my shame.

I met the Fahlgren men only a few times as a kid; played at events few and far between with their children, my third cousins (if I have the lineage correct), about whom my memories are also dim.

The Fahlgren children: Ervin, Warner, Carl and Glen in back;
Vern, my grandma Irene, Gordon and Leonard

My mom told me stories about her uncles, which have since become vague summaries in my aging brain. I have always remembered the part about the Vestal captain being blown overboard; I seem to remember my mom telling me the bomb blast forced my great-Uncle Glen to throw an armload of dough overboard too.

I remember great-Uncle Gordon the most. Because he lived closest — near the C&H Sugar factory on San Pablo Bay in Crockett, Calif. — I saw him the most, which still wasn't more than two or three times. Though in youth he looked much like his brothers, he had thickened and reminded me of a friendly bulldog; even the long thin nose, a feature of the Fahlgren children, had somehow become pugnacious and friendly on Gordon, at least in my mind. One — I don't know which! — lived in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I'm not certain where the others lived.

It is sad and beyond stupid that I don't know much about them, how many are even still alive; of those who survive, I do not doubt they are meeting with the remaining survivors of Pearl Harbor somewhere, remembering the thousands who died, maybe wondering how they survived, and whether they had made the most of the life left to them.

I know only enough about them to know they did.

My grandmother passed away almost 20 years ago, and my mom nearly three years ago. Mom was my gatekeeper to her side of the family, the keeper of the stories, and in her stories and my faulty listening habits, the Fahlgren men have melded in my mind with the men of Lake Wobegon in Garrison Keillor's stories, with their Midwestern, Swedish names. I don't come across any people named Warner or Leonard or Irene. My mom said Lake Wobegon was so much like the North Dakota and Montana towns in which she was raised. I imagine the Fahlgren men as somehow stoic and mirthful.

The last I saw most of the Fahlgren men was a family reunion in 1987, two years after we got married. I joined some of them and two of my cousins for a round of golf (by the way, if you're thinking of learning golf, the worst way to start is with a bunch of people who play golf well, on a South Lake Tahoe course, on the Fourth of July, on the easily contested assumption that golf is easy); I lasted four holes before risking my well-being trying to escape the course; it is nearly impossible to walk off a fully operating golf course partway through a game.

Before I did finally leave, I sat with one of my great-uncles on a bench above the third tee — I am a piteous fool for not knowing which uncle! — who told me, "Beware the man who plays a good game of golf. It makes you wonder how well he's looking after his business and family."

In some way familiar and strange, what he told me lives in me as the legacy for which the Fahlgren men fought.

Tomorrow I'll say a prayer for them and us.

The Mark Trail grows even colder

Classic Mark Trail strip: Peripheral animals are monstrously large and also talk!

The storyline in this comic strip I most love to hate (or vice versa) has now gone on for more than four months. Four months!

How sad is it that I know such a thing?

If you're just joining us for the current episode, you are a well-adjusted individual, but if you really must know: Intrepid wildlife magazine writer Mark Trail way back in July came upon a wounded goose bearing a gold band around one leg. The band bore a biblical verse.

Thus began the slowest investigation I have ever put up with as a comics fan. Not thorough, just slow. It eventually led Mark, along with leeching freelance writer Kelly Welly (weally!), a Gilbert Roland-looking French Canadian named Johnny Malotte, and Mark's dog Andy, into an idyllic and apparently unknown Canadian valley where predator and prey live in harmony.

And subsist, I gather, on Soylent Green. Maybe Charlton Heston will show up in this storyline, warning the human characters what fate awaits them; it's not such a stretch, since all the characters in Mark Trail — man, woman, boy, girl — look like Heston in hairpieces.

Trail and his gang meet Mother McQueen, the fringed buckskin jacket wearing keeper of the valley and alleged progenitor of Mountie McQueen, the police officer linked to the gold band who fails to dissuade Trail from pursuing the mysterious gold band. Damn that McQueen! Coulda saved us so much precious time.

Mother McQueen goes through a long "nothing to see here" bit, including a lie about how many gold bands exist, which the Comics Curmudgeon hilariously points out.

Gold is all that Kelly Welly can think about, and that's where the strip is now. That's where the strip has been for the last two weeks, in fact, with Kelly going bump in the night through Mother McQueen's garage, and concluding somehow that Mother McQueen hides a gold mine and uses a trained grizzly bear to carry the mined ore. Of course, it all makes so much sense!

The other characters have all but disappeared as Kelly steals Mother McQueen's gear and bearnaps her pet grizzly to hunt for the gold mine.

I'm not sure why the gold mine is important. If I found a biblical inscription on a gold bird band, which led me to a strange valley, I'd figure the gold band was readily available and would have plenty of other questions before I got around to the idea of a gold mine. But none of the other characters is pursuing those questions, and I'm not Kelly Welly. I'll be poorer for it.

The story plods on. I'm putting all my faith in Charlton Heston.

Monkey seen, monkey done: New work

Another fun assignment goes by way too fast: Namely, the remanufacture of a monkey.

A marketing firm specializing in credit union public relations asked me to make a monkey dance about the pages of a publication for kids.

Maxwell Monkey is the mascot for a Michigan credit union to encourage kids to save and learn about money management.

The marketing firm, Matrix Manager, sent me a copy of Maxwell: Kinda cute, though to be frank, not rendered particularly well.

Maxwell as he showed up
on my doorstep.
I saw some wiggle room
with the character.

The tone of the conversation with the Matrix Manager people was that the firm could use some help bringing Maxwell to life. At least, that's what I heard and, deciding to ask forgiveness rather than permission, I went for a Maxwell makeover.

I didn't want to ask if Maxwell absolutely had to be drawn as he was sent to me — like maybe he was created by the credit union CEO's daughter, or the CEO him/herself — because I didn't want to know the answer.

But if Maxwell was going to do what the Matrix Manager folks wanted, he at least had to have limber limbs.

First things first, a quick render of some ways Maxwell could look:

Whew! The client chose the middle sample, which affords versatility and reproduces well. I would have liked to explore the sculptural figures on the right, though.

I didn't receive specific instructions on how to pose Maxwell, so I just imagined what a monkey child would do, and drew up a barrel full:

Maxwell benefits from a long illustrated monkey legacy, including Curious George (whom my son called CURE-uh-see George when he was quite little), Disney's version of The Jungle Book, and Paul Frank's Julius the Monkey. I'm sure monkey images have been stewing in my monkey brain for quite some time. Plus, monkeys are absolutely the most fun to sketch at the zoo. Try it sometime.

The sketches helped spur the credit union to choose five specific poses, the finished remainder I bring you herewith. 'Twas fun while it lasted (sigh):

Bragging on our kids

(Warning: The following post contains mushy, sanctimonious tripe. If you don't like people bragging about their kids — and I can't blame you — let me recommend The Comics Curmudgeon, Axe Cop, or a link to Sanjay Patel, a Pixar animator whose illustrations knock me flat, to pass the time. Or brag about your kids on a blog, and direct me to it.)

One of the page treaments our son created as art director of Chico State's The Orion.

My kids hardly ever call, and by that I mean hardly ever send emails or message me on facebook (they know my cell phone is usually off or lost, so actually calling is impossible anyway), but I'm fine with that. I know they're busy, and I want them to go out and build their lives. Though I miss them, I know they have accomplishments to accomplish.

(To be fair, they call their mom often. All of them exist on a much higher technological plane. If you consider typing with your thumbs an advancement.)

I'll see them this week for Thanksgiving, which makes me realize how extra thankful I am for them. They have given my wife and me little to worry about and much to wonder at as they grow.

They've grown — as I wrote once in a poem about children yet to come — good and strong and glad.

That's good parenting, you might be inclined to say. Eh. Good modeling can't hurt, but Lord knows I could have been a better model. I think it comes down to me being extremely fortunate that they comprise my family.

They aren't becoming what I imagined when I wrote to them before they were born, and I'm fine with that too. They just prove the limits of my imagination.

Our daughter is really just beginning her college life in Oregon. Though I'm looking forward to what she eventually does with her studies — I think it's still in flux — I'm most proud of the journey she has taken to date.

A year ago she wanted to come home, regroup and rethink, after just a few months being away, and we were all for it— until we realized that might be the worst-case scenario for her. California's public universities are going through a slow motion implosion, taking our taxes with it and seeking more, and the community colleges are filling with refugees from those university systems. She might not have had anywhere to go once she got home.

We urged her instead not only to stay, but to become a resident of Oregon to reduce tuition costs and her looming loan debt. That path is full of big hurdles, namely showing that you're not in Oregon to go to school but support yourself, for a year.

Realizing she had already made good friends, planted roots in a church group for college students, and bonded with her school (Eugene is crazy in love with its university; it's so amazing to me how few students on campus DON'T wear their green-and-yellow Oregon Ducks gear), our daughter decided she would stay.

Every step since then has been a struggle, but she has plugged on. She even stayed in Oregon through the summer to get the process started early. She looked for work, and looked, and looked, and looked. She made lists and plans, she carried out those plans, and ran into a lot of walls as a result. Sure, when she called it was to complain about how hard everything was, but after each call she tried again.

Even when she found work, she struggled with it: The hours, or lack thereof, the lost personal life, the feeling of being outside the university community looking in, knowing college friends are having their college fun without her. But she continued to list and plan, and continued to work her plan.

I can't say she's fine with where she is — even this week she ran into big bumps — but she has begun to find a groove, adapting and overcoming. She takes the minimum units of classes allowed under the Oregon residency requirements, to keep herself on track, and stays busy with work and her duties within her youth group. Our baby, in other words, is growing up.

Our son will soon finish his time as art director of the university's weekly newspaper, The Orion, and will stay a while longer in school to broaden his experiences. He loves the job, which comes with a lot of pressure, because the newspaper is a longtime winner in national newspaper design contests.

He loves graphic design, which is his major; he loves especially the history of it, the work of those who went before. (Most people, hearing this and knowing me, say something like, "Duh!" But we rarely did artistic things together, and he found this love on his own, spending many, many days teaching himself Adobe Photoshop by making many miniature montages of words and pictures. He knows a lot more than I about design and technique.)

One day last year, a well-known consultant came to the school newspaper design staff and said, "Since your time is short here and your job is to design, why don't you redesign the paper?"

Our son took it to heart and spent his spring break breaking down the newspaper and rebuilding it into a new design, with new column widths, new design rules, new nameplate, almost new everything. Then he drew up the new design rules, returned to school, selected and trained his staff on the rules, then let the talented designers go to explore in this new playground he built.

Designing a publication is a mystery to me, so I'm in awe. I'm also amazed how soon in life he has managed to learn how to manage — such a tricky, nebulous art — to let creative people have their space, to trust them to excel at design on deadline. I don't have a lot to show of his work on the paper, because his work is the unseen framework on which others design.

Something about reading The Orion online last week gave me an overwhelming sense of wonder at what our children are doing and becoming, and I look forward to seeing them soon. Bring your children close, give them a call, be thankful.

Something wicked good this way comes

One good result from 9/11 — if any — is the creation of something called meetup.com. It's an online tool with which people can form and organize clubs for just about any joint interest imaginable.

Without meetup.com, I might still be wondering how and whether I would swim in the open water. About this time last year, I had committed to swimming Alcatraz in the summer, but I fretted about ever getting open-water experience.

Then I stumbled upon the Sacramento Swimming Enthusiasts, a club on meetup.com, which promotes exactly what I was looking for. The guy running this club organized an "Intro to swimming San Francisco Bay" event at Aquatic Park in San Francisco, and I got a chance to swim with an instructor at the South End Rowing Club. Swimming in the chill ocean, without a wetsuit: I had begun a new addictive adventure.

(When I say anybody can form a club, I mean it: The only other Sacramento-area swim club on meetup.com is the River Dippers, who swim and do a bunch of other stuff, as long as it's in the nude.)

Since then, I've been swimming in open-water five to seven days a week (not with the River Dippers, though), having befriended and learned from people I never would have met otherwise, from newbies like me to hardened triathletes to elite swimmers who leave me in their wake.

Instead of swimming by myself at a gym pool at 4:30 in the morning, I'm out in the broad daylight on a clear lake ringed with sweetly scented sycamores and rolling hills. Ironically, I'm still by myself these days, since most of the Sacramento Swimming Enthusiasts have either retreated to their respective pools as the lake temperature has dropped, or fellow diehards live too far away to swim with me every day. But that's beside the point.

On the eve of 9/11's 10th anniversary, I got an email from Scott Heiferman, meetup.com's CEO and co-founder, who called meetup.com a "9/11 baby."

Before that date, Heiferman said he was an un-neighborly New Yorker, cocooned on his Internet.

"When the towers fell," he wrote, "I found myself talking to more neighbors in the days after 9/11 than ever before. People said 'Hello' to neighbors (next door and across the city) who they'd normally ignore. People were looking after each other, helping each other, and meeting up with each other. You know, being neighborly."

That got Heiferman thinking, "Could we use the Internet to get off the Internet — and grow local communities?"

The small startup has now helped spawn more than 100,000 meetup groups across the country, he said.

"9/11 didn't make us too scared to go outside or talk to strangers," he wrote. "9/11 didn't rip us apart. We're building new communities together. The towers fell, but we rise up."

If the narrative is true (I am nothing if not an indefatigable skeptic), it's a wonderful story, and I am deeply thankful for it during this season.