Your room is ready, Mr. Elephant

Different time, same old thorny issues … this illustration says three things: (1) the digital
iteration is locked away in a storage device I can't get to any more, it's so old, so this is a
photocopy of the archived issue; (2) I had Adobe®™ Illustrator©® and wasn't afraid to use
it; and (3) money makes the world go 'round …

How's everything out your way?

We here are terribly, terribly excited! Terribly! We are over the moon! — or so I'm told — because now the Sacramento Kings™® of the NBA©® can finally have its new stadium right downtown!

The Sacramento City Council™ voted 7-2 Tuesday for the $477 million stadium and financing plans to make it possible!

Key to the plan is that we as citizen/drivers need to pay more for parking downtown — and park much, much more frequently!

Sacramento's mayor, former NBA player and three-time All-star Kevin Johnson™, called the vote Sacramento's finest hour!

Now cancer will abate, everyone will have good jobs, and rain will fall precisely on our lawns and between the farm rows each early morning!

Meh.

The stadium issue has been going on for a long time. This hot mess of an illustration (above) is from 11 years ago, and the hue and cry for a new stadium was already an old and familiar sound. Since then the Kings and their arena have starred in a constant melodrama, pushed over and pulled from the brink many times, mere days away from leaving for Anaheim, then Seattle.

The specter of the arena has been moved around like a king on a chess board, inciting this and that political force to mess with the city. Now it's about three miles north of downtown in the floodplain called the Natoma District. Proponents say the stadium, called Sleep Train®™ Arena, is old and small and past its usefulness.

The proposed new stadium, which can also host concerts and ice hockey games, has been moved over the years to the abandoned railyards, slowly being gussied up … out to the state fairgrounds … and now right next to Interstate 5 and the chokepoint of the city's major freeways, where proponents say it will cause absolutely no congestion problems for games and concerts. None at all!

Past owners became villains, outside forces got caught trying to manipulate votes, the whole schmear. Most people, I'm guessing, stopped listening and caring long ago.

Now it's done. Opponent groups will block and parry once more with lawsuits and allegations — misuse of public money, hidden financial bombshells if the economy goes south — but it's done.

New Kings owner Vivek Ranadive has said the new stadium — a chrome-plated crown-shaped thing, judging from the renderings — will become a California icon, as memorable on postcards as the Hollywood sign and the Golden Gate Bridge.

It won't, of course, but Ranadive condenses the whole. Damn. Problem:

Sacramento is forever trying to be what it's not.

By forever, I mean since the Gold Rush, when Sacramento became a boom service and supply town for the mining camps, but never eclipsed San Francisco's might with its perfect port and gateway to the world.

Even after it became one of the greatest railroad cities in the world, Sacramento still served other regions' growth, and most of the Big Four (merchants Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins) who created the great Central Pacific Railroad chose San Francisco for their ostentations.

Maybe for the heart of the 20th Century Sacramento filled its suit nicely, a place of industry and military bases and government, a walkable place with trolley cars. A big small city. I'm judging from what I read and see in books. But the bases closed and industry has shrunk.

Sacramento is, of course, the capital, the hub of government, its mainstay, but I've heard outsiders many times say, "This is the capital?" They're expecting the height of San Francisco or the breadth of Los Angeles, not Sacramento's pale copy of each.

And that's OK with me. It's never been OK with Sacramento, which is really a small Midwestern city nestled at the confluence of two Midwestern rivers out here in California. It can be a fine Midwestern city, promoting small-town ideas of caring for its own, or trying to.

But people in power and money want it to be Seattle, a truly great port city, with amazing centers of culture and entertainment that seem organic — and amazing heartbreaking problems.

Sacramento has the heartbreaking problems, of chronic crime and dearth of services, especially for its poorest communities.

The arena is supposed to solve all, and that's where the city's attention has gone for years. It'll become the keystone for its Seattle-ization. More likely, though, it'll be the same small Midwestern city, but with a chrome dome.

Once the arena is finished, the city will look around and say, "Hey, where did all these problems come from?" They were here all along; they'll still be here, exacerbated by neglect and diverted resources.

The mayor, whose platform has been the NBA®© — he was instrumental last month in representing NBA™® players for the lifetime ban on Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling for racist comments he was caught making — will likely be off to higher office by then.

Sure, it colors my view that:

• I'm not a basketball fan, or a hockey fan or a goer to concerts or whatever else is planned. We took our kids once to a Kings game through a Scouting promotion, and calculated afterward that we could have bought the tickets, the promoted McDonalds™® Happy Meal®©, even the promotional miniature non-bouncing basketball, for much less on our own. And
• I have no civic pride.

For 27 years of living here, I still feel like I'm passing through. Sacramento's got some things I love — a century-old bike trail along the rivers that couldn't be built in today's fierce real-estate hunger, my wonderful Lake Natoma — but the city has never entranced me.

I have never thought, "I want to go downtown," and I rarely go.

That's just me. I'm weird. It's just where I live. Sorry, Sacramento.

The stadium will replace a has-been downtown mall, which is good. It'll spark a downtown revival, I suppose, and developments are underway already to anticipate the arena's catalytic conversion.

But it's a great big want for a monied minority, and the city has great big needs — not least of which are the needs of those whom the arena will displace downtown — and serious attention must be paid.

From my perch as a permanent tourist, I'm still trying to figure out what Sacramento's trying to pull.

Terribly, terribly exciting!

Hidden away

The view from our window of a golden morning across Carquinez Strait.

"How about Benicia?"

So we went to Benicia for our anniversary. A lifetime of living near it and this year we finally went.

There never seemed a reason to go. We are of the great through-traffic world, the one that has to get from northern to southern California, or from Sacramento to San Francisco. So we travel the major freeways — 80 to The City, I-5 or 99 to Los Angeles, 680 to bypass the clustertruck of the Bay Area to get to 101.

We are in a hurry, no time for byroads.

The road to Benicia is 780, a spur of 680, a byroad, but why go? Benicia is not on the way to anything.

Besides, Benicia appears to be no more than so many gargantuan oil tanks the color of school buses, clinging to the hills like mussels at low tide. We've seen Benicia, and it does not beckon.

Or have we? And why does it not?

Benicia, we learn, is behind the forbidding tank farm. You can see part of it from the George Miller Jr. Memorial Bridge on 680 over the Carquinez Strait, but you don't know what you're looking at. Benicia is cleverly disguised behind the thrumming menace of commerce and industry.

I'd scouted the joint months before. Doug, my swimming friend, once invited his buddies to join him in the waters of the strait, where he swims occasionally after work from nearby Fairfield.

A town exists, by God, beyond the oil tanks! An actual town with a city park and a bandstand! Craftsman bungalows and quirky architectural one-offs and Victorian mansions and shopping centers. Multiple parks along the shoreline and a bustling main street (First Street), every shop open.

(Doug may have a hard time getting us to join him again for a swim there, though. We went near sundown at low tide, and a half-mile out from shore I was creeped out to discover I was still swimming in only two feet of water, my hand scraping through the sludge as I stroked. Creatures bumped into some of us — not me! — and one squirmed out from under Doug as he stepped on the soft shallows in the concrete-colored opaque water. We think they might have been sturgeon.

(A man greeted us at the boat lunch when we came back in. He was a silhouette in the new evening. I was breathing hard with the anxiety of a tide seeming to pull me away in these strange waters with their strange creatures. The man said he lived in Benicia 20 years and made his way to the park every day. The sight of us drew him to the water that evening because he thought we might be porpoises; we were rarer even than that: He said he had never seen swimmers in that water before.)

Nancy got us room at an inn by the water, near a ramshackle boatworks that proudly flew a U.S. and California flag. We were high above a beautifully sculpted walkway, part of a trail that girdles the entire Bay Area. The walkway is terraced here and there with inviting concrete benches and stools, where the many, many dogs of Benicia led their many, many owners.

And we did what we always do: Walked, to see what we could see and discover what we were never planning to find. First Street, on closer look, is restaurants and real estate offices and antique stores and aromatic gift shops. Nothing anyone really needs, but all the businesses are open.

Benicia was an early capital of the state. I've never heard a consistent story why the capital is Sacramento; I've read the capitol building in Benicia was never big enough to comfortably accommodate the Legislature, or that Sacramento won in a battle of land and politics and pride and gamesmanship.

The capitol building in Benicia certainly is cozy, a two-story saltbox, but it would house the full Assembly and Senate. Those lawmakers, though, would have to make their own decisions and conduct their own research and be their own selves. Benicia doesn't have room for politicians' handlers.

Still, I wonder how Sacramento got to be the capital, except for the grit and obstinance of people long ago, with gifts I lack. Benicia is toward the back of the San Francisco Bay, past the northern lobe of this great harbor, called San Pablo Bay. The water is brackish here, worsened, I imagine, by the shipping that goes on here now.

Farther east as the strait narrows, the waters divide into the archipelago of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where the rivers empty.

Even today it's not easy to wend one's way through that maze to find the dripping tendril of the Sacramento River.

Imagining the headache navigation was 160 years ago, I picture myself among the pioneers of the state, the one in the back of the crowd who, having come to Benicia, might have said, "This is close enough. Let's just stop here, guys. Whaddya say, guys, call it good?"

It's got a nice view of the head of the strait, and it's a straight shot southwest to the Golden Gate. Even I could find that.

But these folks who made Sacramento capital, they're made of stronger stuff.

Besides, you have to really like wind here. Really, really like it. The Delta Breeze that saves Sacramento on summer evenings reaches wild puberty in Benicia.

In our entire time at the inn, the flags flying at the boatworks next door never slacked, rippling full staff to the east.

Practiced lotus eaters, we knew how to get out of the wind in style, watching it push the sage-colored water of the strait into whitecaps from the many windows of our room or, better still, with an anniversary tradition we started last year: Sipping beers and watching the San Francisco Giants play on the big screen at a corner bar.

The hated Dodgers beat the Giants Saturday, but the Giants rallied back Sunday, our anniversary; a Mother's Day gift for Nancy. Our son and his girlfriend spent the day with us and gifted us with India pale ales they had just made, serious tangy beer.

At a lull in the afternoon I leafed through the 1950 Blue and Gold, the yearbook of the University of California, Berkeley. It was the best choice from the inn's near-empty bookshelf, which held three books by Donald Trump, Lee Iacocca's autobiography, some old yacht parts manuals and even older directories. Remember directories?

The Blue and Gold is huge, well designed with watercolors of the campus by watercolorist Maurice Logan dividing the sections. UC Santa Barbara's campus was just about to be built in 1950. UC Riverside was no more than an agricultural research station. UCLA was a kid brother.

I looked without success for people who might be famous or notable today. I did find many senior women who aspired to be married by June or July, or who wished enthusiastically and publicly to do nothing at all.

Then I looked over at my energetic persevering wife, who had found a rare quiet moment to read in the sunny corner of the room, who did marry me soon after college but did not gush about it.

I'm trying to imagine the colorless world that would exist if Nancy had decided to do nothing at all.

Immural

Speaking of murals …

Once upon a time I thought it a good idea to offer my illustration services as an item for our kids' school auction. My work is mostly editorial illustration, but with a paucity of publishers and editors among school families, I suggested painting a mural.

I pictured bunnies and butterflies and sunshine for someone's child.

The winning child, or his family, wanted Spider-Man®™ and The Incredible Hulk™© instead.

Oh.

Into the deep end of trademark violation I dove. Again. Instead of asking permission, like last time, I'd ask forgiveness should the moment warrant.

This is the final sketch I used for reference. I decided to place our superheroes high above our city, on a sort of busman's holiday, maybe fighting political crime in the capital. The Hulk©® is after Spider-Man®©, or maybe they're both chasing/escaping the same thing, I don't know.

The Hulk is clinging to the curved glass front of 300 Capitol Mall. Sacramento's iconic Tower Bridge, now painted gold, rises just behind him, spanning the lazy green Sacramento River.

The building that houses a branch of Drexel University and shores up the south end of Old Sacramento is right behind Spidey, with the Capitol Mall rolling by it and Interstate 5 going crossways underneath. On the Yolo County side of the Sacramento River is the ziggurat-shaped building that now houses state offices.

All of this performed without a safety net or the cool tool known as Google Maps®©™. Thank you, you're too kind.

(Aside No. 1: Research took me to many different iterations of Spider-Man®™, who changed proportions and outfit design with each new artist. No other superhero seems so malleable. Sometimes Spider-Man™® looked like the prototypical space alien with  oversized head; sometimes he seemed boneless. I went with a more wiry version over the Everyman shape from the 1960s Spider-Man®© cartoons, and the tendrilous gnarly twhippy web stuff.)

To prepare, I made a cartoon in the original sense, a giant drawing to fit the wall, made of big sheets from the end rolls of newsprint taped together. I blocked out the figures on the sheet of paper, then scribbled hard with dark graphite over the lines from the other side. The idea was to tape the cartoon to the wall, trace over the lines and transfer the image to the wall's surface. Michelangelo and those Renaissance dudes had apprentices punch holes along the drawing, and dab at the holes with little bags full of chalk dust, thus tracing the drawing to the wet plaster of a fresco.

Alas, no apprentices, plaster or patience.

(Aside No. 2: What is the story with these superheroes, anyway? Literally, what is the story? On the outside looking in, superheroes seems to live parallel and concurrent adventures, rather than a single story arcing from one comic book to the next. So when I read in the news that a major character will die or transform in some real-world headline grabbing way, I think, so what? Superman seems to be dying, marrying, divorcing or coming out of the closet simultaneously.

(Maybe — just maybe — those news stories are just ways to get people to buy $4 comic books.)

Halftone dots suggesting full color.

My original plan was to build the mural's color with dots to mimic the halftone dots used in printing comics. I would even paint the mural in the four core printing inks, cyan (a middling blue), magenta, yellow and black. Into thin plastic cutting board sheets I cut holes in a grid pattern with a die punch — hundreds of holes. The bulk of my time went into punching those damned holes.

On site, all these preparations went out the kid's bedroom window. The cartoon proved difficult to affix to the wall, so I ended up eyeballing from the sketch to block in the characters and the background.

The halftone dots wouldn't work, either, not without a lot of time and a lot more experience. In printing, the dots are laid down in precise grids, and the dots at differing sizes to create the illusion of image and density of color.

I painted the characters in full color instead, outlining them in black — ironically, the solid color that comic book publishers wished they could do. I painted the background a bit lighter, leaving large expanses of the pale yellow pulpy-paper color of the walls, and painted dots to suggest halftone dots. It became a little Roy Lichtenstein.

(Aside No. 3: It's been a whole year since the last creation myth movie for Spider-Man®©™. When's the next one coming out? Tick tock!

The same for the Hulk™®. Think of the three dozen A-list actors denied the right to star as David/Bruce Banner. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, you're next, and hurry it up. Robert Redford ain't getting any younger.)

The project was at once fun and challenging and strange. Fun because it was drawing on a scale I rarely get; fine cramped gestures with a pencil became grand gestures of my arm, brush in hand, gliding paint along the wall. Challenging to handle all the logistics, preserving the perspective and life of the drawing at a large scale, keeping the carpet and furnishings clean, staying focused.

Strange because I was a fly on the wall, or rather bouncing about in angular patterns in a strange room in someone else's home.

Nothing weird, mind you. Just different. I was living each day to the cycles of other people's lives, hearing halves of ordinary phone conversations, trying to decipher noises. Did someone come into the house? Did someone leave? Is the house empty? What was that noise?

I don't know how tradespeople do it, working in others' homes. If I was smart I would have put on headphones and gotten lost in music. As it was, I became anxious for the school bell to ring and made sure to clean up early to get out of the family's house to retrieve my kids before they did.

Finally done, I got good reviews from the boy's mom.

Shortly after, she hired me to paint something for a daughter's room, something simpler: Silvery purple clouds drifting across the rose-colored ceiling, an unseen setting sun lighting their edges orange and pink. All gesture and scrubbing.

On the way up to the daughter's room the first day of painting, I passed the open door of the boy's room. The superhero mural was almost entirely obscured by stacks and stacks of bins for toys and odds and ends. Spidey looked like he was thwipping desperately to avoid the imminent suffocation by Legos™©. The Hulk® had already succumbed.

What none of us really worked out is that this mural wasn't a gallery piece but the periphery of a living, breathing, very active kid and all his stuff. Spider-Man™ and the Hulk©® proved no match.

Aftershocked

Un-editorial cartoonlike, this one went entirely unlabeled. The pancaked Cypress Freeway in West Oakland had
become an icon of the Loma Prieta earthquake by then, and I thought I'd drawn Gov. Deukmejian and his
Jimmy Durante nose and Dumbo ears often enough without tattooing him with "Duke." But I had also run my quota
of cartoons for The Stockton Record, so this one never ran.

Twenty-four years ago last week, Game 3 of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's at Candlestick Park. ABC was showing highlights (lowlights) of the A's beating the Giants in Game 2 when the screen went yellow, then screen-test splotchy, then black.

In a few seconds the living room of our suburban Sacramento home, 93 miles away from the ballpark, hopped up and down a couple of times. I walked fast into the next room to warn of an earthquake, where Nancy, pregnant with our son, thought she was just getting nauseous.

Measuring 6.9 on the Richter Scale, the earthquake killed 63 people, injured nearly 4,000 and left 12,000 homeless. A section of the Bay Bridge collapsed, as did a long stretch of the elevated Interstate 880, called the Cypress Freeway. Fires spread wide through San Francisco's Marina District, old buildings falling over in the street and breaking gas lines. In Santa Cruz county at the earthquake's center, houses and churches and stores toppled.

Game 3 resumed a week later. The A's swept the Giants in four games.

We in Sacramento escaped the destruction, but two jobs connected me to the aftermath — commenting on it as a freelance editorial cartoonist and writing about its effects on California agriculture as a farm reporter.

On the former, my cartoon commentary followed the arc of a temblor.

First was happy complacency, life being to laugh, the only care in the world the conflicted loyalties of Stockton-area fans as the two Bay Area baseball teams met for the first time in the World Series. Thus:



Then the quake hit. Editorial cartoonists are at their worst in times of natural disasters, with no one to blame and no point in blaming while so many suffer. Often cartoonists play the God card — God or an angel weeping for the loss, or a giant arm dropping from the sky to comfort or smite. Or cartoonists lionize rescue workers, or isolate a suffering child, trying to commiserate or share the blow. This is what I did:

Probably no one saw it, or those who did thought, "Yeah, so?" or didn't know I had tried to render a seismograph's depiction of a quake. I might have been better off just scribbling the Red Cross phone number.

After the shock wore off came damage assessment. The earthquake raised questions about policy and procedure. Blame. Particularly over whether the state's infrastructure, the collapsed freeways, may have suffered from frugality and inattention:

By the time I had hit my stride and angst over the issue, I had also run out my quota of cartoons The Record, so the cartoon at the top, the one I'd preferred over all I did on the topic, didn't make print.

By many accounts, something had changed with Gov. Deukmejian in the earthquake. Whether the scope of the disaster changed him, or he wanted to tend to his legacy near the end of the term, or something else, is unknown. But he transformed from deflecting blame for some of the earthquake damage by his extreme fiscal conservatism (to which the cartoon at the top refers) to becoming an administrator who could work with both parties in crafting fairly quick and effective earthquake aid.

As a farm reporter, I was writing about the earthquake's effect on agriculture. In Watsonville in Santa Cruz County near the epicenter, I saw a massive tent city set up on the county fairgrounds, mostly farm workers driven from their homes by damage or fear of future damage.

Talking with a grower in an hilly apple orchard, I jumped at what sounded like cannon blast. It was an aftershock that felt like Earth had been kicked, hard. All the trees in the orchard rattled their leaves in one quick shake. The grower didn't even blink.

Future to the back

The main sign after …

The signs were ahead of their time. Which wasn't good.

So the Delta King asked me to yank them back into the 19th Century where they belonged. Which was good for me and a fun challenge.

Directional sign before …

Here's how the signs looked (right):

The Delta King is a 285-foot sternwheel steamboat, permanently moored to the Old Sacramento embarcadero as a floating hotel, restaurant and theater.

It was built in 1924 and with its sister the Delta Queen served passengers from Sacramento to San Francisco, and even up the San Joaquin River aways.

Painted battleship gray and renamed USS Delta King during World War II to transport naval reservists, it next showed up on the Hudson River before becoming a floating bunkhouse for aluminum plant workers in British Columbia.

The current owners found it nearly 30 years ago, sunk but reparable in Richmond in the San Francisco Bay; they towed it to Sacramento and renovated it.

The Delta Queen went on to ply the Mississippi River and now also serves as a floating hotel, moored on the Tennessee River at Chattanooga.

Serviceable and easy to read, the Delta King's signs nonetheless ran afoul of code restrictions in Old Sacramento, requiring signs to befit the decidedly lower technology of the Gold Rush era in which the city began. Out went the painterly background and the photograph of the trademark red paddlewheel. Out went the collection of 20th Century typefaces — Brush Script Pro for "The Pilothouse," Trajan Pro for "Delta Bar & Grill" and Univers 57 for most of the rest (thanks to my designer son Liam for his keen eye). Even the lively logo for Suspects dinner theater had to go — a 20th Century creation.

The biggest challenge was rebuilding the paddlewheel to resemble an engraving. The wheel has a lot of parts; the illustration of the wheel many more.

The sign went through several iterations, from showcard every-typeface-at-your-disposal dizziness to the result, legible simplicity and muted colors.


The new typeface, Rosewood, is not strictly 18th or 19th Century, but a digital evocation of slab serif types, cousin to Clarendon, an early 19th Century face cut in England. Rosewood is designed with an elaborately decorative alternative (right):

Not everyone likes Rosewood; someone would likely call me out as a fraud. It has the clunky chunky inelegance the project needed.

The URL at the bottom of the main sign, jarringly 21st Century, is set in Clarendon bold.

Directional sign after …

Woodcut dingbats for balance, typographic elements for flourish, et voilà!

Though I work just a block away part-time as a tour guide for the Sacramento Underground, I hadn't been over to the Delta King during the signs' makeover.

I was working instead from the client's proportional dimensions of the existing signs, and in my mind the sign was never bigger than my computer screen.

My stomach tripped and fell when I finally saw the immensity of the main sign, some six feet wide. My ego couldn't wait for the new sign to go up, and after consideration by the commission on antiquarian signage in Old Sacramento, the sign is up for the tourist season.

Someone has already put a dent in the directional sign. Signs live a hard life in Old Sacramento, as my other signs in the neighborhood can attest.

Come on out and look, if you fancy a notion.

The main sign at work, alongside 19th Century signs typical of the era.

The Delta King, forever churning up a lazy river …

Twin sons of different mothers

These two muck about in my head lately, knocking over the furniture.

Maybe it's their Irish natures, though sewn through with Irish myself I'd hate to cast aspersions.

Maybe it's because they crave attention or like to get their way.

If it wasn't for all the commotion up there, I'd swear they're the same person.

Actually, I think they are.

Spooky resemblance, don't you think? In look and deed.

The guy on the left is Sam Brannan, hero and villain of my tour of Sacramento's Underground.

On the right is his sesquicentennially separated twin, San Francisco Giants "closer" Brian Wilson. He's the pitcher who's supposed to preserve a win for the Giants in the final innings of each game — except he's been out all season having his pitching arm rebuilt. Every day, fans feel his absence, as the Giants make do with an array of relief pitchers known as closer by committee. His absence is less of a nuisance as the Giants near clinching the National League West title, so Wilson has taken to inhabiting the dugout, leading the cheers for his team, his billowing black beard filling empty space.

Each has been the toast of San Francisco in his day.

Sam Brannan is a wonder to me, mostly because few people on tour have ever heard of him. The exceptions are fourth graders who have been paying attention to their California history lessons; alumni of Sam Brannan Middle School in Sacramento; and occasional visitors to Calistoga, the resort town Brannan created in the Napa Valley. That's OK, because I get to tell people his strange story.

Yet almost everyone on tour — even a family from rural Illinois last week — will have heard of John Sutter, who built a fort near what became Sacramento, and dreamed of empire.

Sutter built his life by charming creditors and running away from debt he inevitably amassed. Fleeing debt and family in Switzerland, he lit out for the western United States, living on credit and learning about forts and frontier hospitality as he went.

In 1839, Sutter essentially bamboozled the Mexican governor of the California territory into believing he was a great Swiss military hero, and was granted 68 square miles of land at the Sacramento and American and Feather (Plumas) rivers to watch out for Mexican interests in these far northern reaches. From his fort he rescued weary travelers from the Sierra, including survivors of the Donner Party, and carved out an agricultural base, and did his part to decimate the Indian population.

His plan to create a vast Swiss colony, though, literally fell apart at the discovery of gold. Onrushing gold seekers destroyed his fort and consumed his crops, and Sutter fled again, seeking but not getting redress from Congress.

While Sutter had no idea what to do with the news, Sam Brannan seized on it, exhorting the world to come looking for gold and then selling the onrushing hordes the equipment they'd need.

Brannan had come to the West Coast with his own dream of empire — for the Mormon church. An elder in the church, Brannan had sailed from New York with more than 200 Mormons at the same time Brigham Young was leading most of the Mormons out of Illinois to what became Salt Lake City, Utah. When Brannan failed to convince Young to keep moving west, it was the last straw in Brannan's fitful relationship with the church. They agreed to a mutual divorce, and Brannan returned to California still dreaming of empire — a land bonanza.

Gold gave Brannan the means to lure people west, and he became California's first millionaire on their lust. He continued to gather fabulous wealth by finagling land, selling at high prices, lathering, rinsing and repeating. He owned a fourth of the new city of Sacramento, a fifth of San Francisco, and at one point had invested more in the Central Pacific Railroad than any of the Big Four (Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker and Leland Stanford). He subdivided a vast ranch he bought in Los Angeles, effectively beginning the urbanization of Southern California.

With a small armed force, Brannan even tried to take Hawaii from King Kamehameha III in exchange for a pension for the floundering monarch, but the king's police chief sent the raiders packing.

A brawler, Brannan is said to have presided over the first marriage in the state of California — and organized the first hanging in San Francisco. He gave generously to San Francisco schools, but tore down squatters' homes in Sacramento, and ordered enemies shot. Let's say he was flawed.

Brannan's speculative empire fell apart in an expensive divorce and a massive grant of Mexican land he had neither the means nor the wits (he was a drunk) to maneuver. Brannan is forgotten, save for a Yuba City park, a state park in the delta, a San Francisco Street and the aforementioned middle school. Yet Sutter's name tattoos so much of northern California, a puzzling imprimatur of grace and stature — Sutter Home Winery, Sutter Neuroscience Center, for example.

Two colossal figures who fell apart suddenly and ignobly. Two alcoholic philanderers. Yet one lives on in sanitized, romanticized memory and the other recedes. I wonder why.

Bearded Brian Wilson builds his legacy as I write. He's more of a persona, and the real person is probably hidden deep. As his beard grew and became unnaturally black during the Giants' 2010 home stretch to the World Series, Wilson rose in off-kilter flamboyance, and he reveled in it, becoming one of the most popular players on the team, a roaring lion of eccentricity.

The beard and close-set eyes, like Brannan's, make him intimidating. Giants fans and ordinary citizens know to "Fear the Beard."

Wilson's beard grows larger, and tattoos have crept the length of his left arm during his free time.

The Giants should clinch the Western division this weekend, and will have done so without Wilson on the mound. He will have to reassert his presence on the team next season.

So I have to wonder: Is Wilson Brannan's karmic cousin, or does he just bear a strange resemblance?

My Medici, Part III: Jersey Shore

A Harley Quinn-inspired jersey, never produced; I'm sad.

Greg Archer's ideas and passion outlasted his brick-and-mortar bike accessories store, The Rest Stop. As a result, not all of the products which he asked me to design and illustrate for the store ever saw daylight, unless you count my Web site.

So it's show-and-tell time. First up: Wearables.

Besides seasonal direct-mail and media advertising, I got to create several promotional items for The Rest Stop's use over time, in a broad spectrum that includes bicycle racing jerseys, signs, a racing cap, gift card, certificates, coffee mugs, and a water bottle. I even designed logos for beer brands; I can't remember if they were just whimsical notions for beer coasters one day, or if beer would eventually be produced as excuses to affix labels.

I worked on a mural that succumbed to logistical obstacles. I created flags.

In short, I made Dog, The Rest Stop's spokesdog, jump through a lot of hoops, which it did, with silent aplomb — which has got to be difficult for a spokesdog.

For the "Joker" jersey, never produced (boo!), dog played king and queen and joker:

I bow before the designers of playing cards; those card backs are marvels of intricacy,
of which mine is faint imitation; poor pink dog, how I tortured you!

Dog did double duty on the shoulder designs, my favorite part of the racing jerseys:

voler.com made the production very manageable with its digital templates.

The western terminus of The Pony Express in 1860 (we'll conveniently ignore San Francisco), Sacramento got a history revision from yours truly:

The penny-farthing'd Pony Express rider was featured on one of only two racing jerseys we could manage to ready for market. This one featured a rockin' and rollin' Sacramento by day on the front (including the state capitol building, the Renaissance Tower known locally as the Darth Vader Building, the Tower Bridge, a basketball for the Sacramento Kings and a baseball on the other side of the Sacramento River for the Sacramento River Cats) …

And the back side of the city at night:

Though not to scale, The Rest Stop store is just about where it used to be in relation to the city.

I've stopped riders on the American River Bike Trail to tell them I designed their jersey. And they've looked at me just about the way you imagine they would if a sweaty schlub stopped them in mid ride to say such a thing.

The other jersey The Rest Stop was able to make and sell gently parodied the Tour de France  climbing champion's shirt. It featured … guess who?!

The first jersey we worked on also never made it off the drawing board. Oh, how I wanted to see the so-called "flywheel" jersey out on the trail:

It would have featured, for the first time, the penny-farthing image and early
bicycles, including the da Vinci velocipede hoax.

Why? I don't know. It just needed to be done.

 And the best part, the shoulder patch:

One of the last projects for The Rest Stop was also among the most fun. A cyclist's cap that Greg himself models here:

Flap down …

Flap up…

And the best part of that project was making up sponsors' logos to adorn the hat:

Sonic screwdrivers were Greg's idea, inspired by Dr Who; Chain Food was an actual idea
I proposed for a long-ago client (who was a fool not to use it!).

Pace Sportswear also furnished an easy-to-use template.

My Medici, Part II: And a little pink dog shall lead them

Jay Ward and Rocky & Bullwinkle might have inspired this bit of nonsense.

Microscopically speaking, Greg Archer has been to me what the Medici family was to Michelangelo, a great patron making his art possible.

Microscopic in scale, not in passion. Michelangelo had tour bus-sized blocks of Carrara marble; I had 4 1/2- by 6-inch glossy cardstock.

{Maybe a better analogy — though still grossly out of scale — would be Walter Paepcke and the Container Corporation of America, and the Westvaco paper company (now Mead Westvaco), and the role those companies played in advancing American graphic design in the middle of the 20th Century.} 

Greg Archer,
wearing the
cyclists' cap I
got to design.

Greg's role as patron was the same as those giants: "Here is your design playground. Have fun!"

One difference: "Oh, and take the dog with you."

Greg needed a regular flow of printed marketing materials to alert bicycle enthusiasts to his shop, The Rest Stop, on a shady street near downtown Sacramento. And he wanted to amass a collection of useful textiles tying The Rest Stop to customers' daily lives. Sacramento is a bicyclists' city with its own amazing playground, a paved trail that snakes more than 30 miles from the Sacramento River up along the banks of the American River toward Folsom Lake and beyond.

The penny-farthing and the controversial image of an early bicycle design, attributed
to Leonardo da Vinci student Gian Giacomo Caprotti (or a complete hoax), make
appearances as secondary characters.

From the beginning, Greg gave me wide flexibility in designing his promotions. The one constant: each had to include a pink dog, the mascot Greg inherited when he bought the shop from Larry and Yvonne Robinson.

I don't know if the dog has a name or who created it (if you have information, you'd feature prominently in a future blog post!) It's bright pink, and its bug eyes remind me of the logo for the Mooneyes speed-performance car parts company I knew from childhood (as the world's worst builder of Revell model hot rods, even of the SnapTite® kind).

Though likely created in the early 1980s, the dog has an earlier feel, as if a stray from underground comics or psychedelic rock posters. I love that it has nothing to do with bicycles or bicycle parts, and would love to know its genesis.

Tiny and unassuming, the dog was nonetheless the 800-pound gorilla of every design, innocently but relentlessly imposing itself. Rather than grouse about it, I had to decide early how to incorporate it creatively. So I rebuilt it digitally in order to dismember and manipulate it.

A cardinal tenet of graphic design is that a business logotype is — usually — sacrosanct, with strict rules about its use, size, placement, color, typeface, and association with other logos should they appear together in the same promotional material. All for good reason: Brand identity is the most powerful and succinct public face of an entity, and deviations can send off or conflicting messages.

One of my favorites, inspired by owning a real dog
(not pink) and bearing witness to her desires
and capabilities.

My son, with many design opportunities already, notes that the design dictates BMW automobiles imposes on its logo use and placement offers no flexibility for alternative designs for a dealership campaign he worked on. Choose any BMW website and you'll see the same gray banner and precise placement of the circular checkered blue-and-white car medallion. 

Greg liked breaking that tenet. Though the dog's presence was paramount, no fences were built around where it was and what it did. Even the carefully drafted typographic treatment for The Rest Stop could be manipulated.

As a result, the dog became hero and jester in promotions, a silent Teller (and customers were Penn Jillette), for no reason more important than sending the message: This is a business for and about fun; come on in, visit.

Sacramento opens the city to an arts celebration
the second Saturday of the month. Though off
the usual circuit, The Rest Stop did its part
with bicycle-related artwork — and this
Lichtensteiny thing.

Market forces, including Internet sales, compelled Greg to close The Rest Stop. He re-emerged with Archer Bicycle Repair, for which I was fortunate to design logos.

Though our business relationship grew to include design for a jujitsu program Greg helped teach, and by extension his business partner's jujitsu camp, The Rest Stop's closure spelled the end of design laboratory, to experiment for public scrutiny. And Greg had more ideas than market forces allowed; but that's another blog post to come.

Here are some of the many promotions I got to help with:

Another favorite: When I felt confident that
The Rest Stop's customers would need only to see
the dog to know for whom the bicycle bell tolls.

Dog, just hanging out, atop the bicycle that da Vinci's student may have invented
but probably didn't. Don't let facts get in the way of a picture opportunity.

To know art is to mock it gently …

All good things having to come to an end, it seemed fitting that the last things customers would see were the searing, earnest eyes of the faithful, put-upon pink dog.

For good men to do nothing

A funk permeates the week, for reasons concrete and ineffable.

One canary in my coalmine is this blog, for which ideas normally abound. This week it feels like blogging for blogging's sake, fulfilling nothing more than a small disciplined rite.

What I would write feels even more trivial. I'm temporarily tired of talking about open-water swimming (as tired as you may be of reading about it) this week, and even tired of swimming open water (or tired from it). Though I hold a trove of drawings, and await a time soon in which I can show-and-tell new work, I don't see the value this week in posting them.

I've been thinking, and that's dangerous.

Thinking that this week, among many, the government of Syria is bombarding its city of Homs,  News sources whom I judge credible cite sources who say government agents are detaining and torturing children as part of its campaign to suppress opposition to President Bashar al-Assad. That's in addition to relentlessly shelling the city against any and all. Just sheer, plain, open (as close as the news media can get) bloody repression.

You could rightly ask, "Where ya been?" Atrocities go on all the time, in the Congo, in Iran, in Egypt, Pakistan. Where was I during the ethnic cleansing by Bosnian Serb forces against Bosnian Muslims, you could ask? Probably where I am now, at my desk, letting the news trickle in and out my ears.

This week, for some reason, it jolted me to stupefaction.

This week, an investigator for the United Nations reported that Sacramento violates the human rights of its homeless, restricting access to water and public restrooms. Of course, open urination and defecation is a crime; so the city forces homeless to add to the complex nefarious factors that render them homeless, the daily undignified crime of evacuating their bowels. And I in stupefaction and indifference, let it go on.

One TV news station interviewed a homeless woman who said she goes to the bathroom in plastic grocery shopping bags, and tosses the filled bags into trash bins. She looks matter-of-factly at the reporter as she says this, with just a hint of hesitation, gathering up what dignity is still hers to tell an unseen public what she must do to get through her day.

Up to that moment, I had not even thought of her indignity. It's so easy for me to choose not to. I know children live on the banks of the American River, without a place to call home; I know that each morning a van for the Mustard Seed School drives on the levee roads, calling out to the hidden encampments that school will soon start and would you be able to come today? I've known it for years. I choose to forget.

This week, a reason to celebrate a freedom still hangs under threat. A U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that California's Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage, is unconstitutional.

"Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples," wrote a judge in the majority opinion. Clear as day.

Gay marriage is still banned, the court decided, citing the inevitable court appeal to come, and the expected hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court.

My congressional representative, Republican Dan Lungren, advanced Prop. 8's basic argument, that the people have spoken and marriage should remain only between a man and a woman. The elusory beauty of our system of government is that it's designed to save us from ourselves: True, the majority of people could also vote that Islam should be outlawed or that redheads should be interned or that some children for this or that reason should receive an education, but that wouldn't make it right.

We have legally oppressed our citizens by the color of their skin, country of origin, gender, and sexual orientation. We are beginning anew the oppression of citizens by their religion. Yet our rule of law has painfully, slowly turned on itself to erode those oppressions.

Dan Lungren does not represent all whom he is duly sworn to represent, and by extension, does not represent me.

And what, for god's sake, is so much better about marriage being between a man and a woman? The evidence for its hypocrisy is piled high, and a society made richer and more complex by a myriad of family dynamics, good and bad, turns the argument for tradition into cheese cloth.

I still can't fathom the harm gay marriage does to anything or anyone, except by the creation of vitriol in those who have decided all of us should live in their mold and fashion. It does not interfere with traditional marriage. It instead accords rights already inherent, that law up to now has denied.

I offer no solution for any of this. It vexes and perplexes, and I am impotent in my apoplexy. What little I was doing to help anyone else's unease has given way to a weird worklife lately. Excuses, excuses. But somehow I have the energy for semi-public self-flagellation? Hmm.

One of my favorite cartoonists, Art Spiegelman, who laid bare his own barely bearable guilt when he created the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, a Survivor's Tale, said "Perhaps guilt is a useful civilizing agent that keeps people from behaving worse than they otherwise might. Guilt can be an explosive thing to live with, but it may be the price we humans must pay for civilization while trying to learn true Empathy."

The hell of it is, for reasons plain and impenetrable, my funk will lift and I'll examine the totems of my life with new vigor. And children will still scream in torment in Syria and elsewhere at the hands of those who see them as weapons. A woman mere miles from my warm home will find no other choice but to shit in a bag and throw it in a Dumpster™©. Gay and lesbian couples will still truly wonder if their day of acceptance will come.

Where ya been?