Just a wee morsel

I was trying to capture a dreamy girl too big for the quiet nurturing
turn-of-the-century place in which she was raised.

The fun of volunteer/pro bono work — in the ideal, anyway — is being able to work out ideas selfishly, without necessarily having to please anyone but yourself. Of course, you don't want recipients to hate the result, so there's that snag in the ideal universe.

When our daughter performed and worked behind the scenes in high school productions, I volunteered graphics help, helpless as I was at most other tasks the theater department needed.

Here's a T-shirt design and some secondary playbill graphics.

Forced me to read a book!

Instabillion

Instagram of Nancy and me visiting our son and his girlfriend in Chico.
Not in 1972, as you might be thinking, but in 2012. That's what
$1 billion will get you.

I'm getting old, I confess, and more confused by the minute. Must be the great Powering Down that eases me into an eventual life of apoplexy and prune pudding.

Leafing through magazines at the hair cutter's or the dentist's, for instance, I frequently see page after page of celebrities I've never seen or heard of before.

They appear without context, without an explanation or justification for their celebrity. They're just there, demanding me to recognize them, but I don't. In the pictures they are marrying or divorcing or having babies that they name after a combination of colors and farm implements.

Or they are selling their Taos mansions (never buying, always selling … why?), or on the islands they own, rocking bikinis made by the fashion icons I have never heard of either.

Burger made, picture taken, 21st Century.

If context ever is provided, it's a disappointment: Usually the celebrity is someone I'm supposed to know from a reality television show in which a woman dates a bunch of men — or vice versa —on camera, and never really does marry the one he/she picks to marry — surprise! — because the Bachelor or Bachelorette really wants instead to appear on "Celebrity Apprentice" or "Dancing with the Stars." Again, the snake eats itself. (No, I'm not linking to those two shows.)

Fabulous rivers of money move beyond my notice, and vast unknowable people dip refreshed in their nourishing current.

Can I get a "Come again?"

The death knell for me is Instagram®™©, an app that facebook just bought for $1 billion. Dollar sign, the number one, and then nine zeroes.

And why not? With Instagram, users can take a perfectly good digital picture, run it through a filter to make it look the awful of their choice — poorly lit, yellowed, scratchy, abused in someone's back pocket, chemically color mismatched — and share it on their various social media.

That's what it does, right? Did I leave out something? Did I stomp on a nuance?

Meet Simba, keeper of our son's
girlfriend. I think the film roll
data is part of an Instagram filter.
That sound is broke Kodak™®©
retirees gnashing the nubs of their teeth.

In other words, with the same technology that rocketed us light years away from the era in which bad things could often happen to good photos, we can make good photos bad on purpose — for the enjoyment, no doubt, of legions who never had to make do with actual, physical poorly processed/colored/lit photos that came by snail mail order.

My son loves Instagram; it's how I know about it, through his facebook posts. These are his photos. To be fair, he's studying photography, knows computer graphics through-and-through, and also lives the social media, just like his peers, not merely dabbles in them. Also, he doesn't have the bad photos of which I speak — until the time of my prune pudding when he gets some of the photo albums for his inheritance.

He takes some good pix with Instagram, excepting the galoof at the top next to the lovely woman. He also takes pictures of foods he will eat, or roads he will drive on. Birds of the air. Leaves of the tree, and such.

When I first saw Instagram photos, I said to myself, "Hey, that's … ok … "

Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home in
Scottsdale, Ariz. Also an architecture school. Wonder
what the master might have said about Instagram …

Not something I'd ever use, but I've seen it, and I move on. Which is the mantra I deploy for most tech tools I encounter. I'm old, I told you. (Also, why is the Instagram website address spelled "instagr.am?" with the dot in the middle of the word? It's not like I don't understand too much already.)

Not sure I ever, ever, ever would have said, "Hey, Instagram has gotta be worth $1 billion, easy!"

Because it isn't. Unless the market says so, so I'm wrong.

Instagram will keep on doing what it's doing, its creators announced. Ten people total work at Instagram, which by the way has no profits. Each employee could get $100 million in cash and facebook stock options if they divided the purchase price evenly. Which they probably won't.

CEO-founders gotta eat, after all. Where have you been living, under a rock?

With me?

If you play it, he will come …

My banjo never looked so good or held such promise.
My high school friend Wayne Singleton, who went on to be
a photographer and graphic designer carefully arranged the
still life in late light, and I went ahead and ruined it with a
poor copy and a bad scan. I still have the picks and the hat.

The cardboard case, shiny black in the pattern of alligator skin beneath the dust, would be hard to pry from the corner of my closet. It contains a Hohner banjo, badly out of tune I'm sure, and it would be a pathetic tribute to extricate and try to play it in memory of Earl Scruggs, one of those who got me playing the thing to begin with.

Earl Scruggs, who may have done more than anyone to usher in the three-finger picking style most people associate with bluegrass banjo music, died last week.

But the banjo is really like Field of Dreams. I played it not because of Earl Scruggs, but for my dad.

Steve Martin, the comedian, might have got me interested in the banjo at first. He's an excellent banjo player and writer.

Martin's playing took me on a backward journey where I discovered Scruggs and Lester Flatt, then Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. So I wanted to play.

My parents and I bought the Hohner, and a how-to book endorsed by Scruggs.

I never sought approval from my dad. We didn't have that kind of relationship. Short of not doing my share around the household, I think I was doing OK by my dad; I always felt he supported me. But his own childhood was a checkered mystery to me, and I guess I wanted to make connections. Country music was a big clue — he lived for it — and bluegrass was at its core. So I practiced and practiced, mostly to have something to talk about.

One Sunday a month we'd pack a chicken lunch and drive south to Santa Barbara where bluegrass pickers congregated in a park. I still remember the comfort a distant sound of players tuning would bring, their guitars and mandolins and banjos and basses mewling in the still spring air. Though I always expected to go home knowing a new song or a lick, I usually ended up showing someone else what little I knew.

It was a bit like learning a second language and having no place to apply it. Maybe my hometown had bluegrass players, but I didn't find them. When I finally did find players in college, I couldn't keep up and/or became interested in other things. Bless him, one of my college roommates, David Middlecamp, still jams with friends. My boxed banjo sits in the closet as a tangible regret.

Or maybe it had served its purpose, establishing that connection between my dad and me.

One night in high school my dad and I listened to the Cache Valley Drifters play at the Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara. A third of the way into the concert, the band announced a surprise guest, and from behind the curtain stepped Don Reno.

For the folks in the theater, this was akin to Bruce Springsteen showing up unannounced at a nameless roadside tavern to play a set.

The story goes that Earl Scruggs' star rose as Don Reno joined the Army, and that if not for that people would associate the three-finger style with Reno rather than Scruggs. Somehow I knew that story when Reno stepped on stage.

The instrument demonstrated why Hohner is better known for harmonicas — sorry Hohner! Toward the end of my playing days, my dad introduced me to an Air Force airman who was transferring out. He had a Gibson Mastertone, the gold standard in banjos. The thing thunked in my lap, and I realized the big resonator on the back of the banjo is supposed to be solid wood, not laminated plywood. The strings on the Gibson also lay mere millimeters off the head, the strings soft to the touch of the metal picks clamped to my fingers; on the Hohner, my fingers had to climb high above the strings, to attempt finger rolls in the air.

Which reminds me that I must make a lot of excuses in life for why this thing or that turned out the way it did. I can't blame the instrument for why I didn't keep playing.

Maybe the box wouldn't be so hard to pull out of the closet after all.

Walking my talk

Stephanie Eisner's controversial cartoon for The Daily Texan, which I got from The Digital Texan. This beats my previous description of it, for one thing. For another, I didn't mention in the last post that the figure in the chair represents the media. For a third, I don't know of too many editorial cartoonists who draw with ink washes, so I thought you should see.

A graduate student at the University of Texas, Austin, has launched a petition seeking to reinstate Stephanie Eisner as a staff cartoonist for The Daily Texan.

Eisner was the cartoonist with whom the newspaper discontinued its relationship after publishing this cartoon last week. Critics protested that the cartoon was a racist response to the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. The newspaper apologized, Stephanie Eisner took a couple of opportunities to apologize and explain, and prairie fire over the shooting and its aftermath continues to burn hot across the nation.

Samian Quazi, the graduate student and a former columnist for The Daily Texan, contacted me asking to help publicize the petition, and I do so now. You can go here to sign the petition and read Quazi's arguments.

I support Quazi's effort because it makes some points that I missed in the previous post about the cartoon, which was really not much more than a oh-something-similar-happened-to-me! catharsis.

Quazi is taking action.

Chief among the points: Stephanie Eisner appears to have been let go for doing her job. She advanced her opinion on the opinion page. It's a valid, credible criticism of the news media's recklessness in covering an incident like Trayvon Martin's shooting.

I infer that Eisner used incendiary words — particularly "colored boy" — to focus her point that the media firestorm over the shooting and aftermath helped mushroom the incident beyond our ability to examine the details thoughtfully, and maybe consider that the rage exceeds its due.

Just my opinion.

When too many professional cartoonists use their space as visual knock-knock jokes to give readers a break from all that … opionion, here is a cartoonist trying to use every square inch to advance a meaningful idea, and prod people to think. 

Eisner's cartoon indeed enraged some readers, though not as Eisner must have intended. Protesting readers perceived that the cartoonist was hurling slurs and perpetuating racist ideas. She was doing just the opposite.

"We sincerely apologize for publishing the offensive cartoon and for the harm that decision caused," The Daily Texan wrote, noting that its editorial board approved the cartoon.

This one of those rare times in which the usually insincere "I apologize to any who were offended" apologies works, because Eisner didn't draw an offensive cartoon. She drew one in which some readers chose to take offense, and not to see her point.

The only thing Eisner may be guilty of — besides misspelling Trayvon Martin's name — is lack of clarity. Ironically, she might have skirted the rage by employing extreme visual stereotypes to make the same point; turn the mother figure into a summer camp leader, for example, scaring hell out of her shrinking charges with a monster story, say. Use the same language and letterforms, but ramp up the contrast and melodrama.

Which brings up the second big reason Stephanie Eisner should be reinstated and Samian Quazi's petition should succeed: The Daily Texan is a student newspaper. Sure, it operates like a hard-nosed medium-city daily at one of the nation's top journalism schools, but it's a place where students learn their craft. It's where they should be able to fail, reassess, regroup, and move forward, applying what they've learned.

Eisner should not have had to apologize for her cartoon, and then told to go away. She should be given opportunities to learn how to make her point sharp and unequivocal, and practice it.

So far, all she's learning — all any of us is learning — is that it's suicidal to dare an opinion, to fight prairie fire with prairie fire, because your supposed supporters will throw you into the fire to quell the outrage, even if the offense misses the message.

Odd lesson to learn in a country with all that fancy Bill of Rights stuff.

Read more on Samian Quazi's quest here.

What I was trying to say …

Oy, did I blow it!

Lord, how I know Stephanie Eisner must feel!

Until last week, Stephanie was a staff cartoonist for The Daily Texan, the campus/city newspaper for the University of Texas, Austin. Then she drew her take on the Feb. 26 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a teenager in Sanford, Fla, and the newspaper discontinued her services. (Here's another view of her take.)

You know the Trayvon Martin story, because we're all awash in the fallout of its controversy: George Zimmerman, described as a white Latino and a Neighborhood Watch captain in a gated community, told police he shot the unarmed Martin, who is black, in self defense. What really happened remains in dispute; critics say that Zimmerman chased Martin down and shot him, which may have violated "stand your ground" laws designed to protect citizens under attack. Zimmerman says Martin attacked him. Protests demanding Zimmerman's arrest spread across the country.

The incident is a newflash point over race relations, racial prejudice, lingering unresolved issues of institutionalized injustice, and general angst over the safety of children and teens. The hooded sweatshirt quickly became its symbol.

Stephanie Eisner was trying to add a meaningful tangent to the fierce expanding dialogue over the shooting. Her attempt backfired, went viral and public, and only fueled more rage.

The cartoon — which The Daily Texan editorial board approved — depicts a mom (?) reading a story to her child (?) from a book, "Treyvon (sic) Martin and the Case of Yellow Journalism."

"AND THEN the BIG BAD WHITE man killed killed the HANDSOME, sweet, innocent COLORED BOY!!," the mom tells the child, aghast.

Eisner was trying to say — at least, I infer — that many of news and entertainment media went immediately to stereotypes in the early going, typical in a rush to report. Rather than exhibit patience and care, or an examination of nuance and uncertainties, the media made this a simple black-and-white (literally and figuratively), good vs. evil story. Thoughtful, thorough reporting and meta-reporting comes later, as in this case, but often too late to ameliorate the results of the first news.

Pundits opine on the first news, sometimes idiotically, as in this case. Other pundits opine on the idiocy of the first pundits, and so it goes. Anger lingers.

Many readers regarded Eisner's point as endorsing the perpetuation of racist stereotypes and slurs — because she used slurs and stereotypes to make the opposite point.

I know how she feels, having drawn a cartoon for the Mustang Daily, my college newspaper — freelancing after I graduated. The 'toon blew up in my face and embarrassed the newspaper. That's the awful thing at the top of this post.

What I was trying to do — and the fact that I still have to explain it means I could and should have done a much better job — is restate George Santayana's aphorism, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it:"

If we don't study the effects of racism that happened before us, if we don't appreciate the harm our discriminatory thought and action — and inaction — can do, then we are not prepared to improve our communities and are apt to continue harm.

That's what I was trying to say.

I even ladled on the irony by having one of the vandals run off to a history test. No specific incident prompted this cartoon; more likely I was trying to employ the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday as a spotlight on ever-lingering issues of racial tension and the potential for the college audience to ignore lessons of the past. I trusted readers to realize I was exaggerating to make my point. No one at Cal Poly was burning crosses or painting racist rants on walls at the time.

In my cartoon, Martin Luther King is supposed to be an ethereal figure formed out of the smoke of the burning cross. But the way I drew him, he looks more like a flesh-and-blood giant, inexplicably plugged waist deep into the earth, the smoke sooting his skin and suit.

But the thing that gutted this 'toon — the tiny detail that made its message the opposite of my intent — is the graffiti on the wall. Well, really just n-word.

The newspaper ran the cartoon. Students and faculty wrote letters, all of which I probably tossed long ago. The letters said what you would expect: How dare he! Is this the kind of person we should have at this university? Fire the cartoonist! I'm boycotting the newspaper! Fire everyone involved with this disgrace.

I understood this much about their anger: I hadn't been clear. It's as if the writers saw only those small words at the geographic center of the cartoon, and regarded all the other elements as a doodly, meaningless frame. They received those words — that one word — as my message.

I wrote an apology at the editor's request. The fact that I had to write an apology meant I had not done my job, which was to be so crystalline in my opinion that the work stood on its own. Probably my relationship as a guest cartoonist for the Mustang Daily ended shortly after.

Why did I toss the angry letters? Pain, I guess. But if I was going to become an editorial cartoonist, I had to be ready for rock throwing, and gather up all the rocks thrown. Good editorial cartoonists want people to react to their work, maybe to get angry, maybe to laugh sardonically, but in some way to be moved to act — to write a harsh letter to the editor, to support the candidate or cause, to consider another argument.

Like Stephanie Eisner, though, I wanted readers to react to what I meant to say.

RIP: Rex Babin, editorial cartoonist for The Sacramento Bee, passed away last week at 49 from stomach cancer. He had a unique sketchy, stoccato drawing style, and was adept at exposing President George W. Bush and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for what they were.

a … HA!!!

That noise you hear, America, is the thunder of people running to support my as-yet unchallenged  theory on California wine.

The big guns have joined ranks behind me, so who knows how big this Rally for Reason will grow?

By big guns, I mean the folks behind Freakonomics: Writer Stephen J. Dubner and economist Steven D. Levitt, who through two books, a documentary film, and now a radio show, have challenged long-held assumptions about the way we think about money and the economy.

I love it when really smart people reexamine what we firmly believe or stubbornly assume and, with calm scrutiny of facts, show us we're dead wrong.

Stephen and Steven have agreed not to go near my firm beliefs and stubborn assumptions, so I firmly believe and assume my campaign for Wine Truth will advance undeterred.

Of course, Stephen and Steven don't know who the hell I am, but I sure know them, because last week my neighborhood National Public Radio station (shout out to KXJZ, Sacramento!) ran old episodes of Freakonomics Radio in place of an hour-long local issues talk show.

And what to my wondering ears should appear but a story challenging our ideas about the economics of wine. To wit: Wine is a con.

Dubner didn't say it quite so boldly or succinctly, but the episode featured other economists using calm factual scrutiny — and some funny subterfuge — to demonstrate that drinkers can't really tell an expensive wine from swill. OK, less expensive but nicely labeled wine like you can find in any supermarket.

One economist hosted a wine tasting for learned Ivy League oenophiles (wine snobs) by putting a variety of wines in separate unlabeled decanters. Not only could the learned drinkers NOT tell which was expensive and which cheap, but claimed to note a difference in two wines in particular — even though it was the same wine poured from two different decanters.

Another economist created a fake restaurant, complete with fake menu and wine list, carefully constructed to include extremely expensive wines that The Wine Spectator — the beacon and trend maker of wine journalism — had condemned in reviews. The economist submitted his "restaurant's" wine list for The Wine Spectator's annual awards recognition for such folderol. The economist's hypothesis: The awards were an excuse to sell advertising.

The economist's fake restaurant did indeed receive one of the awards. A representative from The Wine Spectator asked if he'd like to advertise the news in the magazine. The economist attended the awards ceremony and explained his fraud.

The same economist conducted a more thorough, scientifically controlled study of many, many wine tastings held at vaunted wine festivals and celebrations, and came up with a similar conclusion to the economist with the intimate gathering of tasters: Wine drinkers can't tell the difference between expensive wines and the more economical ones (which the industry calls by a funny name: fighting varietals).

Carve out an hour of time and listen to the episode. At the very least, it's entertaining.

So, why is expensive wine so darned expensive? It's a meta-marketing tool: It not only makes people think the wines are better for their expense, but they pay the big bucks for the false privilege. Genius! I shall charge in the five- or six-figure range for my illustrations from now on.

The expensive wine probably doesn't cost more to produce than the others, but maybe the prices should reflect the actual costs, huh? Beers are mostly the same price. The smaller so-called craft brewers charge more for their six-packs than the Coors and Anheuser-Busch products (simple input-costs per unit of product stuff), but not anywhere near the five to 10 times what some wineries charge over others for their product. Maybe wine drinkers should vote their wallets.

Look, people are going to enjoy their wines — I recognize there's no stopping that. I can't taste the difference in wines, and when my wife and family and friends go wine tasting, I'm the designated driver for that reason. I have to go stand among the grape cluster-shaped trivets and $50 sweatshirts and chocolate-covered elderberries so the winery staffers can't hear my eyes roll when they talk about how this wine has notes of cherries and noses of vanilla and a finish evocative of sandalwood, or whatever. It's all just countertop psychology: I tell you this wine tastes like fish, and you'll certainly detect a nuanced blend of rock cod and sturgeon, maybe a jouncy afterthought of halibut.

The Freakonomics guys didn't exactly say that all of California's wine comes from one big municipal tank hidden somewhere near Modesto (and that it's all white wine and the red wine is simply dyed); they didn't say all the wineries in the state drive up to little spigots on the tank late at night and get their boutique's allotment.

But that's the conclusion I'm jumping to.

Rally for reason, America, and speak truth to the wine power!

Sight unseen: New work

You wouldn't see much of this work outside of this blog.

These pieces became the fallout of one of those pesky paradigm shifts.

Icons, Round 1, testing the waters …

Still, I had fun with a long laundry list of illustration projects for California ISO, which was publishing a document designed to explain to the uninitiated public and industry experts alike what Cal ISO does (which is to work ceaselessly to make sure California always gets the electricity it needs, in a sustainable way, at a fair price; you've just endured a grossly simplified explanation).

Driven by a consultant, the project was designed to arrive fully formed on the desks of decision makers, so few elements were sketched first. Most went directly to digital rendering.

The job, should I have chosen to accept (and I did!) asked:

Icons, Round 2: Decision makers needed
to see work in close-to-finished form, so
few sketches underpinned this series of work.

• Can I draw one of those twisty compact fluorescent bulbs, but twisted in the shape of the state of California, and make it glow?

• Can I make a bunch of icons representing the many electrical power sources and conveyances, such as dams for hydroelectric power, pipes for geothermal power, windmills, transmission towers?

• Can I make a bunch more icons showing power users, such as homes and buildings?

• Can I make icons showing consumer/producer, such as electric vehicles — lots and lots of vehicles?

• Can I fit all these icons into diagrams showing how power flows between consumers and producers?

• Can I make more of the same icons, but in a different way, when a tiny paradigm shift (a foreshock?) requires a change?

• Can I come up with a whole new concept for the fluorescent bulb, when that concept crumbles in the paradigm shift?

• Can I turn the western states into giant puzzle pieces suggesting their dependence on one another for power creation and distribution?

• Can I turn California into a giant conference table, around which stakeholders decide power policy together?

• Can I render a giant map of California, dotting the landscape with all the kinds and sources of electrical power?

• Can I create a single panoramic landscape, showing the spectrum and variety of electrical production and consumption?

Thoreau as art director: Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Sure! I said.

Still more and different icons …

In the end, only the last two on the list survived the paradigm shift.

The initial project itself was a shift from previous projects I have been able to do for Cal ISO. The biggest difference from the start was that it didn't require keeping to a limited official Cal ISO color palette — a dark blue, a dark green, a yellow green, an aquamarine, an ochre and a brown.

Since it's a tough — though welcome — challenge to keep illustrations lively within the palette, being able to roam around the visible light spectrum felt freeing.

Off I went:

One iteration of the state-shaped table …

… after another …

… after another …

The West became a colorful puzzle …

The design staff folded all the illustrations into the publication. The consultant presented it.

The decision makers decided: Uh, no.

That sound you heard was the paradigm shifting.

Out went all the icons and with them, the color. Another illustrator was called in to create different icons. I was asked to create a couple of new cover concepts, just in case: 

Shout out to San Diego, Los Angeles(ish), Fresno and San Francisco …

I was still filling the night sky with all those huddled masses of light when this idea got nixed.

But these didn't make the final product. Instead, the publication sampled for the cover the one illustration that remained, of the landscape of power users and consumers. You can see how that illustration gradually filled with details as its color drained away:

I measure satisfaction in my jobs by what I learn and the fun I had, and Cal ISO was gracious and patient throughout, even as the ground shifted.

This, from the first round of ideas, is still my favorite: