Category Archives: Life

On Ramps and Off Ramps

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My head has been doing some really weird stuff the past few weeks, “what if-ing” my Mom would have called it.  If life is a highway, which I do believe, then it has to have on Ramps and Off Ramps.  Physicist fans would say these were connections to “alternate Possibilities”.

• What If I had not given up on LA and stayed, hard as it was?

• What if I had left The games industry when I thought I should have rather than when I did?

• What if I hadn’t worried about what other people thought about my art, compared it to theirs (and found it wanting)?

All I need is a bowl of water to gaze in and I am the Nostradamus of my own years.

Alsmost…

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Today felt like one of those amazing summer days I remember from when I was a kid.

That was the sum total of the day’s exciement though as I occupied myself by slaving over a hot Ciniq all day.  Felt pretty good though as I got ALMOST 8 hours last night.  NICE!

Yes, it’s the simple things.

God Speed Richard Branson

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It has been “Leaked” that today SPACESHIP TWO might actually “Kick the tires and light the fires” by doing an inflight engine start. Keep them in your thoughts my friends, this is a good thing…

I was walking past the old VIRGIN Megastore in San Francisco when the door opened and out stepped Richard Branson, alone, in an impeccable Grey Suit with what looked like a CD bag in his hand. I had my doubts it was really him until I saw me noticing him and he smiled.

I should have shaken his hand. I love that guy.

Getting My Bearings…

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moebiusartI got some decent sleep last night so it feels as if the day is starting out on a positive note.  Yesterday I was so sleep deprived that all I could do was the simplest of tasks.  Days like that can be wasted or, if you are lucky, they can form the nucleus of a new idea of a new path.  A grain of sand that, with a little work (and saliva) can form itself into a glorious pearl.

I love books, especially books about art and animation and stuff like that. Since I started out I have been buying them, often in such quantities that I became overwhelmed by the volume of information in them and took to just scanning them rather then reading them.  All this potential knowledge at my fingertips and I just have looked for “the good parts” for a lot of years.  That being the case it would explain why my life seems less like a novel and more like Cliff Notes.  Never to late to start reading though, as I have recently learned.

On my way to the chamber of “Excremeditation” I reached up onto one of my shelves and took down a book that I have thumbed so much it is like an old friend “The Art of Moebius”.  Jean Girard has always been a favorite of mine ever since Brian Bain showed me the first issue of HEAVY METAL.  I got my first copy of this book at the Sca State Library, and picked up a second at a used book sale just so I always had one around.  Many pages in one copy have paint on them, or ink smudges where I had spilled while working with them open on the drawing table for inspiration.  I had copied every illustration at least once…

…but I was not sure if I had ever actually READ the text?

Text in an art book often might just as well be Greeking, a screen shape to offset the images whilst everything you ever needed to know was contained in the captions. That, was alt least what the ADHD driven 22 year old in me had always thought but was it true?  Now that I have to tend to a 56 GI tract reading material is an important thing and when I finally sat down and started to read I was pleasantly surprised.

In the pages I found new insights into who this artistic hero of mine had been, how he thought and how directly he channeled those thoughts into his art.  He was open enough with the internal workings of his thoughts that, if you peeped around the corner carefully enough, you could see into his soul.  After I was done and got back to the studio I looked up at my wall of reference books and I wondered what else I was missing by not having scanned each and every page.

I took down a book yesterday and started to do just that…

Can I tell you a secret?

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For a number of years I have not really opened up to anyone, even in BLOG.  I got hurt pretty bad in a lot of different ways. Emotionally I sabotaged my family for someone who I thought I loved but who didn’t love me back.  I had my heart go bad at the same time, romantic or ironic I am not sure but I wound up with a pacemaker.  With the implanting of the pacemaker I found a level of dread that I didn’t really know before.  They say that you know when you are having troubles with your heart because of an almost overwhelming sense of dread, like your body responds to the damage like a wounded animal.

When I got the pacemaker I was told that it shouldn’t have any negative effects, in fact that things should be better than they were.  The trouble is that I inherited my Mother’s almost epic level of hypochondria along with her dramatic flair to overstate things to grab attention.  More directly, I am a genetic drama queen.  I became aware of the latter trait really in the last few years, as I have bounced from lousy living situation to lousy living situation, from lousy cash flow to lousy cash flow. Too long out of work and too long in the tooth I am the last guy to be considered for a job, if my resume ever even gets to a HR department’s desk.

When you have a Pacemaker you are suppose to have it checked every six months.  I have health insurance so I should have been keeping up with that, but I haven’t.  It’s been at least two and a half years for me.  I am not even sure it is still functioning to tell you the truth.  It is like I have decided to commit suicide in slow motion.  These days I don’t sleep very well, who can after two years sleeping in a WESTFALIA. I don’t bond with people because I am afraid I will get hurt again.  One woman a friend tried to fix me up with referred to me as “Emotionally Opaque” which I guess says it all. The last few months I have had trouble breathing, trouble catching my breath and physical intimacy is out of the question. I have nothing and no one that excites me anymore and I am just simply too tired to look for solutions anymore.

I have made a couple of Doctor’s appointments, and canceled them all.  I made another for next week, but I will most likely miss that one as well.  All through my life I have seen movies where someone is laying in bed, dying and there is someone at their beside telling them to hold on.  The person in the bed replies:

“I’m Tired”

That’s what I am my friends, I am tired. I have stumbled and crawled and struggled and fought.  I have been told I am inspirational, that I never give up.  The truth is though inside I have.  I’m too tired to care anymore and I have very few things to care about.  My son is grown and I know if I pass it will hurt him. I lost my Dad…and my Mom…and my brother…and so many friends.  Things don’t seem to be getting any better, if anything they are getting worse. I used to go to sleep wondering what I would do tomorrow.  These days I lay down and try and sleep and hope that I just won’t wake up.

Take me out to the ball game…one more time

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MattWilliamsOne of my more pleasant memories was of going to GIANTS games with Nancy.  We would both get off work and meet at her apartment where we woukld change into warm clothes, knock back a scotch and then drive over to the 19th and Noriega Golden Gate transit bus stop.  There was a bus that ran specifically to Candlestick Park for evening games, the seats awash with Orange and Black and smiling faces. The other riders ranged in ages but not in their conviction to the GIANTS or the game of baseball.  On the trip Nancy would talk about whatever she was working on at PG&E at the time and I would pass on the goings on at Lucasfilm.

Upon arrival at the park we would queue up at the turnstiles, gather whatever odd little trinket they were passing out at the gate and point ourselves towards our seats.  On the way we would stop off for our usual at-the-park dinners, Polish Sausage with sauerkraut and mustard and a a beer.  We had learned about Sauerkraut earlier in the season on a dare, I cannot remember who dared who but we had both taken our first bite simultaneously and since then the Polish had to have kraut.  The beer was usually in commemorative cups that we would later wash and store for future use.

Then came the best part, we would make our way through the bunker like labyrinth of the stadium and out the gate into the park proper.  I liked it best later in the year when the San Francisco skies were a variegation of Maxfield Parrish colors highlighted by the under lit low clouds in the foreground.  The stadium lights would be on and the field would be so green that you had to squint hard against its Viridian glow.  In that light a baseball’s white hide would glow like a small comet as it moved from one the flashing hands of the players warming up.  We would find our seats and settle in, laughing and joking with the people in the seats around us who would be our life long pals for the remainder of the evening before vanishing forever into the fog. Nancy would joke about “The Thrill” coming out on the field when Wil Clark would come out, looking me square in the eyes.  Her gaze told me though that the thrill she felt was that at that moment we were at the park together.  The Olive cast of her skin set off the broad white arc of the smile that crossed her face.

After the game, win or lose, we would catch the bus back to our car.  Back at her apartment we would put on some music, share a night cap and each other’s company before settling into the warmth of her comforters.  The sounds of the city outside would become hushed, like the fog was telling the streets that people were trying to sleep.

 

…an old aquintence comes to call.

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Weenie_01The past few weeks I have been struggling with old demons.  How long do I have left?  Does it matter to me or anyone else in the world? I feel so tired and used up.  I feel old and it disturbs me.  When I became a freelancer it was so I could be my own boss, I thought it would be exciting.  These days though I just want a real bed to sleep in and to live in a house where someone might actually give a damn if I live or die.  Just now though I think if I were to pass in my sleep it might be days before anyone would miss me.

Helluva thing…

Advice on the death of Queens

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"Maggies it's your turn with teh electrodes..."

“Maggie it’s your turn with the electrodes…”

I have a lot of British friends on Facebook and I love them dearly.  Coming from an Air Force family I grew up around a lot of Brits, Kiwis and Aussies.  Contact with those subjects of the crown shaped a large part of me into who I am and what I like.  I even surprised one mate when I “Outted” myself as a Gerry Anderson fan recently.  British people I love you, you are to America and Americans like myself the older brothers or sisters.

Over the years you have acted in good faith as an older sibling should in tell America where it has gone wrong, often in a subtle and loving “Why are you hitting yourself?” sort of way.  You have told us that we are FAT BASTARDS, when you could get it out between pints of Stout and bites of Scotch eggs and sausage rolls.  You have told us we are complete MORONS when it comes to cars whilst driving to work in your Vauxhalls. You remind us how cataclysmically nieve we are about the media, as you read your morning copy of NEWS OF THE WORLD.  All I can say as a devoted little brother from the wastelands of California is THANK YOU SO MUCH.

Recently Britain suffered the loss of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, you may have read about it in the papers…or in the never ending yammer-a-thon on my News Feed on Facebook.  I get from that feed that the majority of my British friends feel pretty much about Mrs. Thatcher the way I feel about our late President, Mr. Ronald Reagan (or RONNIE RAYGUN as I always loved to call him).  Being a native son of California I had the unique opportunity to vote against Ronnie 4 times.  Given the opportunity I would have increased that count, the number of times it increased being a direct function of the number of times I was given the opportunity.  I did not like then man nor did I agree with any part of his politics. When he passed I wasn’t sad, I wasn’t happy I wasn’t numb or anything like that.  He had become a sad, reclusive old man with Alzheimers living out his days from pudding cup to pudding cup.

In their Heyday “Maggie and Ronnie” were the darling of the Neocon scene, rolling in piles of money from supporters with glazed over eyes.  The two of them working in concert made it OK to be mean spirited and insensitive to other people and thus they set our society’s brogan’s on the path to the total cock-up that we are all living in today.  If two people can be called to accounts for having looked at everything that was achieved by the working man from the Victorian era up to the Swinging fifties and saying “it has to go”, it is these two darlings. If you lived through it or read about it this is obvious. At the same time when someone passes there are certain proprieties that should be respected. Funerals are not for the dead, they are for the living.  They are meant to bring closure to those who are left behind, to release grief etc. When dealing with the finality of death there should be some measure of dignity, no matter what you feel about the deceased.

So it is in the spirit of a dutiful “little brother” that I respectfully say to my British siblings:

“You are acting like a load of TWATS (to use your own parlance)!”

I say this in response to the video of an old song from the Wizard of Oz running around the internet like a Guy Fawkes clone on Crystal Meth in an attempt to make some pseudo FOX NEWS brand statement by getting the song to number 1 on the charts. I will pass over the easy dig about how that spot was taken by Duke Dumont’s NEED U , too damn easy bro. I will also pass on indignation that you would use images, no matter how badly doctored in After Effects of Photoshop, of Margaret Hamilton for your little escapade (she was a good actress, an advocate for education and animal right and a mom/grandma). What I will say that your bitter little meme just makes you wind up looking like dicks and makes you an easy target for the media, a media that is owned and operated in large part by the people Maggie and Ronnie helped get there.

I will also let you in on a secret about what you are going to see in the coming months.  Margaret Thatcher’s name on airports, building, motorways and anything else that is large enough to hold a bronze plaque. When it happens rest assured that no amount of dickery and picketing and rending of your hemp work shirts will stop it.  The fact remains that we have reached a tipping point in the development of our society, the point where it doesn’t matter how badly we out number them they have the money and the power.  Why?  Because back in the eighties more people bought into their lies then saw through them and as a result let them do what they wanted.

Now before you spill your fried eggs and Heinz baked beans all over the page three girl and rise in universal indignation, chill out.  Before you INFORM me that Thatcher was ousted by her party and vanished from public eye in disgrace etc etc know that I love you and I have survived Pommy political tirades in the KING’S HEAD in Santa Monica so I know where you are going.  Take a look at all the policies that Thatcher put in place and see how many of them are still in place…and how many times your MP (the ones you voted for) voted for them.

On both sides of the pond I hear a lot of voices shouting long and hard about the state of the world and who is to blame, none of these voices pausing for even the briefest of seconds to maybe consider that they should take a look in the mirror. To that I will add that if you can think it is appropriate to act like twelve year olds who have just discovered iMovie on your parent’s computers I must say as your loving, respectful little brother:

Grow up.

This Life: Who are you?

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This is the ORIGINAL version of the X-Wing cover art. It is the first Digitally produced cover Lucasarts ever did. I did it using renders from 3DStudio R1 and compositing them in PHOTOSHOP V1.

The day I left the most successful company I ever helped start my partner (who had become my boss) and I sat at the big conference table in his office and had a final chat.  We had worked together for ten years, done what was the best work we had ever done together, and it came down to a last conversation.  There was an exchange of envelops with checks and office keys were taken off of key rings where they had resided for a very long time.  I asked my partner, my friend, why he had never let me grow in the company:

“Because I never knew what you wanted to do” he replied.

At the time I thought his comments self serving, justification for an ending that served no one.  In retrospect though I know what he meant.  I have always had an almost insatiable lust for the NEW.  I have always wanted to learn NEW STUFF, and then move on.  There is so much in this world and our lives are so fleeting that I have always felt that I needed to rush through and taste a bite of everything before I was gone.  The trouble with that is that I have wound up a “Digital Renaissance Man”.  Artisan in many traders, master of none. In a world that moves like a river of mercury and a business that changes with each new compile of each new tool that is pretty much a recipe for failure.

When I was in college I took a sketching class from a fairly well known artist in Sacramento.  I had already been showing at Science Fiction conventions, sold some art and was “self teaching” myself.  While working on a still life in class a TA for the class looked at my work, surrounded as I was by football players and cheerleaders looking for simple free credits before they started their lives working at…whatever they were going to do after graduation.  The TA looked at what I was doing and said:

“It’s a pity you want to be an illustrator, you could be a great artist.”

I, of course, was incensed, how day this “Jackson Pollock wannabe” say such a thing?  Later on we were doing a plen air sketching session on the banks of the American River in alumni grove.  It was a warm day (Sacramento after all) and the sun was Autumn golden through the California oaks.  I was really into Renoir at that time and the oil pastel piece I was working on showed it.  The instructor moved through the class, joking amiably and flirting with the co-eds.  When he got to me he did something he had not done with anyone else.  He saved me for last and when he saw what I was doing he sat down in the grass next to me and watched me work.  We exchanged pleasantries and I continued to work.  Finally he started a dialogue

“You want to be an illustrator, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I replied not looking up from my pastels “I want to do book covers and editorial illustrations.”

“Ah” he grunted then was quiet for a moment “it’s funny, I see an abstract expressionist inside you screaming to get out!”

The conversation ended there, I was incensed.  I packed my drawing kit up and never went back to the class.  It was the middle of the semester but he still gave me a B for the course.  I was 22 and knew everything, except how to be respectful of those who had gone before me.  Now, as my brush strokes grow looser, in whatever media (analog or traditional, visual or code) I wonder how much more I would have done thus far, how much happier I would be if I had just figured out what I wanted and listened to the words of those who saw something in me I didn’t see myself

 

Multi Level Life Journies

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California Summer School of the Arts 2012, Orientation Day

A long weekend behind me, a long week ahead but everything about it is good!

Nicholas is now deeply buried in a month long summer school of intensive writer’s training at CalArts in Valencia.  The location is very cool to me because CalArts was the school (one of them) that I desperately wanted to go to but never followed through because I figured I couldn’t get in. Yeah, I will admit that I didn’t try as hard as I should have.  Still I am so excited for Nick.  It’s hard to have him away for so long for the first time but as a parent it is exciting to see him begin his life adventure for real, having survived the banal world of High School.

Neither Laurie nor I wanted to spring for a motel room, the gas was expensive enough, so we did the entire trip in one bit.  I was up at 3:30, as usual, and we were off at 7:30.  Neil Gaimen was on the stereo until Cal Trans started teasing us with warning of horrors on I5.  ”Expect Delays” it said.  Nick spoke of the deadline to arrive, which he had named “the razor wire”. Radio off, iPad out.  Local gas station guys warns of 2 hours delay.  Nick is nervous and gets edgy.

In the end though it was hardly a hiccup, just a one lane stretch 7 miles long South of Buttonwilow and we got to orientation on time.  The energy at CSSSA was electric, the students motivated and the teachers excited.  Nick was nervous because, well he is 400 miles form everyone and everything he knows. We got him checked into his dorm room (unloading was a keystone cops affair) and his roomies seem nice, one is there for Theatre, one for Music.

After a bar-B-Q and a jazz concert we bid Nick good-bye, much harder than we let on, and headed North.  A wrong turn took us down Hwy99 rather than I5 so we lost time there.  In the end I was having trouble staying awake and I think actually dozed off twice (but I caught it).  My head actually hit the pillow at 3:30 ironically enough.  As for Nick, by the time we called him on the drive home he and his roomies were watching a desert lighting storm from their dorm room and although he tried to sound adult we could hear the kid in his voice.

The neighbors like to fish so they woke me in a clatter of equipment at around 5:30.  I dozed a bit more then went inside to dress.  A quick trip to the market and I shut my phone off and settled in for a long day of learning the ins and outs of my new animation software.  It was quiet, too quiet, but I put the Moody Blue on and lost myself in my art.  I didn’t really look up until Midnight.

Somewhere my son is taking his first steps towards his life.  It is as it should be.