Pilot's Log

Not the kind you think.

Tonight, as I was downloading something I now need an unpacker program to open (that I will acquire when I have bandwidth/time), I went to the storage boxes and retrieved an old VHS tape of MTV's The Maxx and watched most of an episode. It was the one in which Maxx is stuck in a Dr. Seuss poem, and then must fight Mr. Gone's hired assassin Hammerhead once he re-emerges in the "real world", while Julie and Sara's mom engage in an R&R trip that is neither sufficiently relaxed nor restful.

That series had been probably one of the most pervading influences on me and my creativity at that time of my life. Ethics & Toy Soldiers was, thematically, a fusion of The Maxx with Gulliver's Travels. The Maxx pretty much says that it's about who we want to be as people, versus who we're forced to be in this world; E.& T.S. was meant to be about the world we want to live in, versus the world that forces itself upon us.

But once again, the reality of the Internet Age has changed everything. Each of us, we inhabit roles we would have only had our imaginary friends to play, have become one another's imaginary friends. The Internet is Maxx's Outback, inhabited by monsters and Izzes and Leopards and really strange stuff...but it also has a comforting effect on us because it's part US.

* BLUE or
* BROWN/BEIGE?

Want a show of hands one way or another, please? Thanks in advance.

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Of course not. It's difficult getting into the heads of others. When I create I do so just for my own satisfaction and if it satsfies others, then okay. No point on getting hung up about it tho'.

Hey.

My father introduced me to carbon paper about thirty years ago. I was in the habit of cutting up magazines for the pictures, and so to minimize the damage, Dad brought some carbon paper back from his job as a VA civil servant and taught me how to trace. It became my artwork of choice for a number of years...and back when kevissimo and I were in gifted class together doing film projects, his was a live-action Star Wars "tribute" while mine was a automobile race collage animation using magazine-picture traced cars I still have somewhere.

I guess if I really wanted to, I could attempt to remake it using the Flash animation program and other such tools.

I gave up on artwork in college, not because I wasn't interested in art but because there was a kind of disconnect in my life in that vein. What I was doing was to "art" compares to what a rapper "sampler" does in music...attempt to use other's work to relate my own messages, if I had them. I had given up actual tracing midway through high school...I tried to go beyond that and ran into my own incompetance as a visionist. Besides, the world was changing. And it didn't help that my art teacher in high school was a rabid modernist. I turned my attention to writing (prose and drama) and to the computer--and to flying--and it all fell by the wayside. I still doodled on scratchpaper, but I knew I wasn't an "artiste".

I'm thinking back about this phase of my life because of a project I thought up...I've been making my nephew a kind of coloring book, by scanning in clip art from catalogs and magazines of mine and altering them to make them more "crayon-friendly". The finished files are being saved as .gifs so I could either e-mail them to him or print them out when he visits here. One of the things that bugged me about the coloring books I had as a kid, was the fact that sometimes the areas of the artwork that should have been open for color were simply blacked out. Thanks to the graphics software at my disposal, I can correct some of this.

I would have loved to be able to do this when I was a kid. I feel a little kidlike as I work on these pictures. This is a project that is taking me back to an old, familiar neighborhood...just when I feel about as alien as I've ever felt.

FP