Radiant Comics

This is the tale of Monday July 14, 2008 when I had to report to federal jury duty. A tale of civic duty and civic boredom. Strap your selves in for the ride of a lifetime. (Am I selling too hard? Maybe.)

A few weeks ago I was notified, by mail, that I had to report to the Federal Court House at 500 Pearl Street in downtown Manhattan at 8:30 AM. No cell phones allowed. My exemption for my 2004 county jury duty had run out. Time to head to the big city.

The first thing this meant was that I would have to be up at 5:45 AM and out of the house by 6:15 to catch a 6:39 bus to NYC. I haven’t had to do that in a while. The bus put me into the Port of Authority Bus Terminal at about 7:35 and from there I had to catch the A train (cue music) downtown to the Chambers Street Station. Then a funny thing happened. It was as I arrived at the Chambers Street station that it struck me that I had no idea which direction Pearl Street and the courthouse were. That far downtown in NYC the streets don’t run in a predictable grid pattern. It’s the old Dutch part of town and the streets run every which way. For the first time in many years I had to ask a passerby for directions. It was really weird not knowing where I was in the city. That hasn’t happened in a decade. But I made it to the courthouse by 8:15.

There were about two to three hundred of us gathered together in the Honorable Constance Baker Motley Jury Assembly Room. It’s a big room with high ceilings and lots of chairs so we fit comfortably. We had to fill out a form and then, a the proper time, form two lines to hand in our form and the jury I.D. papers that were mailed to us. After we were all back in our seats we watched an orientation film about what to expect from jury duty. Having watched countless episodes of “Law and Order” I had some idea of what to expect.

Soon a judge called down and said he needed a jury. The head Jury Assembly guy got on the microphone and called out fifty five names. My name was among them. All of us had to respond with a, “Here”, line up two across, march our way to the elevators, and head up to the designated floor. We were warned not to rush willy-nilly into the court room (do people really do that?). Instead we were met by the head courtroom guy who escorted us into the court.

When the judge arrived the head courtroom guy reached into what I can only describe as a bingo ball turner and pulled out names one by one to fill the twelve jurors’ seats. Mine was one of the twelve names called. Juror number nine. I went up and sat in the jurors’ box. Because it’s a fancy new building the jurors’ seats were nice and each even had a flat screen monitor in front of it. The advancement of justice.

We were introduced to the prosecution and defense teams. After that we were then given some details of the case. It would be an armed robbery trial. All twelve of us were asked some general questions (the other 43 potential jurors has to listen too) mainly about if we or any of our immediate family worked for the government or law enforcement. None of the questions had any relevance to me. Nor the other jurors.

After that all twelve of us were asked, one at a time, to state our job, marital status, and what our spouse’s job was if we had one. Then it was time for the lawyers to make their first round of cuts. Each side has six “peremptory challenges” where they can get rid of a juror for no cause. This was the first round of such where the prosecution uses one and the defense two (or that may be reversed I can’t remember). I didn’t survive this round. I guess, “Artist, self employed, and single” wasn’t what they were looking for. It was back to the Honorable Constance Baker Motley Jury Assembly Room for me.

All of this was done by about 11 AM. My time in the court room was maybe half an hour. The whole rest of the day was waiting in the assembly room and not knowing what was going to happen. When I got back to the waiting room they called out another 55 names but I was not among them. I sat there and drew in my drawing book. At noon we broke for lunch so I used a pay phone to call my friend Susan to meet for lunch. She works somewhere down there. We had some sesame noodles and dumplings out in front of the court house (and we both spilled dumpling on our pants). That was the highlight of the day.

At 1:30 it was back inside through jury entrance and the metal detector. I had to empty my pockets, take off my belt and shoes, and run all of it through the X-ray machine. I had to do the same in the morning. Such is how we live now.

Back inside the afternoon was nothing but waiting. No one knew if a judge would call down for a jury. Often the threat of a jury will make parties settle. That’s part of a jury’s job. To threaten with our omnipresentness. I figured that if we didn’t get called by 3:30 we wouldn’t get called. I couldn’t imagine the judge that would try to pick a jury that late in the day. But I had no idea if that meant that we would have to come back on Tuesday. No one did. At least no one that I talked to. The unknown was what created quite a bit of anxiety in the room.

At one point I think I heard one of the people who worked in the room (there is a big raised sort of judge’s bench across the front of the room that people worked behind) say that all of these people (meaning us) were gone. I wasn’t sure of what I heard but I was hopeful to be released so I could catch up on my work. I’m a freelancer. If I don’t do my work I don’t get paid.

At around 4:00 The head Jury Assembly guy got on the microphone and told us we were no longer needed. He thanked us for our time and told us our jury duty was over. We could all go home and we didn’t have to come back. Spatters of applause broke out. Tension was released in the room and smiles were everywhere. I dashed to catch the A train and make my way back home.

All in all not a bad day. I did my civic duty and got some drawing done.

It’s hard not using my credit card. That’s been what I’ve been trying to do for the last month. I’m not in credit or money trouble I just want to slow down my spending for a couple of months. I had to go to the dentist in May and fork out a couple of grand for some teeth work. Not the end of the world. I had the money but I am person who keeps track of his budget pretty closely. As a freelance artist there have been plenty of times in my life where money was tight. Without a budget and discipline the worry would have killed me. I’m not a fan of worry.

I have two budgets. The cash budget and the credit card budget. The credit card budget is usually for art and computer supplies but since I buy lots of things online these days there is plenty more stuff I buy by credit card. I pay the card off every month. A “dead beat” customer as credit card companies say. I don’t have to pay interest or late charges that way. They’ll eat up a budget.

The cash budget is for everyday things like food, comics, bus tickets, and anything else bought at local stores. Earlier this year I noticed my credit card budget expanding while my cash one contracted. That just means I was buying more things online than in person with cash. But a credit card budget can get out of hand a lot quicker than a cash one can. For a couple months I wondered how I managed to spend so much more that I wanted to on the card.

So in order to make up for the money I paid out to the dentist I decided to not use my credit card as much for a couple of months. I increased my cash budget a bit because it’s not like I’m broke I just wanted to maintain discipline with the credit card and save a few bucks in the bank. Over the month of June I managed to put only a hundred bucks on the card. That’s about the amount I was aiming for but boy was it hard to not go higher. Those twenty five dollar internet purchases can add up fast.

Compounding my budgetary pressure is the fact that I need to spend about three grand on a new computer. The computer is how I make money so it has to be done and the government, through taxes, practically forces us freelancers to spend on tax deductions. But, still, three grand is three grand. I was going to get the computer in June before a part of my tooth broke off. That’ll put some worry into your mind. So I have to save a little more money for the computer and I want my credit card cleared off when I plunk the three grand on it.

With the computer on my card that will make for another month of trying not to use the card. The numbers really add up quickly when you start at three thousand. The mind goes, “Eh, what’s another hundred” and before you know it the bill is three thousand eight hundred bucks. That I don’t want to happen.

So it’s cash for me for a little while. I never say, “Eh, what’s another hundred” with cash because cash is a bit more real. I have to count out and hand over the bills to someone. I have to look in my pocket to see if I have enough. I also don’t carry a lot of cash so I can’t spend it as impulsively. Cash is more meaningful than numbers on my credit card receipt.

I just used PayPal for some internet purchases this week. That takes the money right out of my bank account. It was all art supply stuff I needed that I still didn’t want to put on the card. PayPal is less real than cash but more real than credit. Watching my cash in the bank go down means more than watching the total on the credit card go up.

I don’t like to use PayPal or a debit card for expensive purchases. If something goes wrong then the store already has my money. Getting it back can be tough. A credit card company will have a much better chance of getting the money back if you call them up and tell them you were ripped off. Credit card companies don’t take kindly to people taking their money. A bank won’t care as much because it’s not their money. It’s mine.

Pulling back on the credit card tally means cutting down internet purchases, cutting a few things out, and postponing a few items on the buy list until I can budget them properly. A tough task that. But in the end it’s how I like to roll.

It’s time to replace my back pocket notebook again. I’ve been carrying the same one for about five years now and it’s about to fall apart. Whenever I get a new one I reinforce the holes where the spirals go through the thin cardboard of the cover. The holes aren’t tearing on my current notebook but the cardboard is about to disintegrate. The front and back covers are falling off and disappearing. Years of sitting on paper will do that.

I bought this fancy new back pocket notebook last winter but haven’t used it at all. I’m used to the softcover 89¢ variety that we all remember from grade school. I slip it into my back pocket and don’t even notice it. The new one has a much harder cover. When it’s in my back pocket it’s like sitting on a flat piece of wood. Who knows if it may soften up and be comfortable one day but I’ll never make it to that day. What is the point of a back pocket notebook (they even call it that on the label) that isn’t comfortable in the back pocket?

I have a few other small notebooks lying around the place that someone gave me once but they are useless. They are even cheaper than the 89¢ ones (I think they were three for 89¢) and are made of the cheapest possible paper. I pulled one out to see if I could reinforce the cover but the cover tore as I was handling it. It was if the cardboard was tissue paper. And the paper could be ripped out of it with the smallest amount of force. You’ve never seen a notebook so useless.

I am a fan of small notebooks and being an artist a fan of small sketchbooks. Big sketchbooks do nothing for me. I’d rather use individual pieces of paper if I’m going to draw big. Big sketchbooks are too bulky. Most of my sketchbooks in my college years and through my twenties were of the hard cover variety. They had a tough durable black cover that you could decorate nicely with a silver paint pen. Usually those ones were eight by ten inched but sometimes five by seven inches.

All of the years I carried one of those sketchbooks around I was never really a fan of drawing in them. I liked them well enough as objects. As “cool books”. But I found them hard to draw in. Due to their being hard covers they would never lie flat enough for me. I was always holding the book flat with my left hand as I drew with my right. A clumsy method of working.

It also didn’t help that I was never really a very good “sketcher”. I wasn’t interested in drawing from life and the scritch scratchy way of building a drawing from a sketch always frustrated me. It wasn’t until I was well into my late twenties that I discovered my own way of drawing that wasn’t really related to sketching. It is more related to surrealistic automatic drawing. Sketching never helped me learn drawing. Learning drawing did.

For the past nine years I’ve been using a hundred page five by seven inch spiral bound sketch book to draw in (yes there were a few years I didn’t use a sketchbook at all). It lays flat and I fill it up with lots of little ink drawings. I always draw in ink with a thick line in that book. No scratchiness allowed. I go through about one a year. That book of drawings is where I generate all of my ideas. It is invaluable to me.

I still don’t think the spiral bound notebooks are nearly as pretty as objects as the black clad hard bound ones but they sure are better for drawing in. Plus to make the spiral one more durable I made a form fitting canvas carry bag for it. I slip the sketchbook into the canvas bag and then drop that into a larger bag or carry it on its own. The canvas takes all of the abuse and leaves the book sitting pretty. And I do like pretty.

The power of music and memory. That’s what I’m thinking about. Music can unexpectedly trigger memory like nothing else. Last night as I was lying in bed listening to one of my music playlists the song “Does it Really Happen?” from the 1980 album “Drama” by Yes came on. Suddenly I was transported back to my high school days playing stickball in my neighbors back yard and cranking out the tunes on the boom box.

This isn’t city stickball that I’m talking about. That’s more akin to real baseball where you run bases and such. No, I’m talking suburban stickball (also called “Strike Out”). That’s where you paint a strike zone (a box with an X in it) on the side of a schoolyard wall. One player bats with a broom stick and one player pitches with a tennis ball. If the ball hits the strike zone then it’s a strike. Outside the zone is a ball. The game can be played by just two people and if so there are lines in the “outfield” (usually the parking lot of the school) that if reached by a fly ball designate single, double, triple, and home run. If played by four or more people then they can play the outfield and catch the pop flies. No gloves though.

Pitching is also done differently than in city stickball. I’ve never actually played city stickball but in all the depictions I’ve seen of it the ball is lobbed or bounced in to the batter. In suburban stickball, since you are throwing against a wall, the ball is pitched with as much force as you could muster. Sliders, curve balls, and off speed stuff could be thrown as well as the fast ball. Well, my buddy Steve could throw those pitches. I sucked at them.

Sometime in High School Steve and I built our own portable stickball wall. We probably got tired of the hot blacktop of the schoolyard and wanted to play in the grass of our own yards. We framed out a four foot by eight foot wall and covered it with plywood. We stood it up and leaned it back a bit on a couple of long two by fours. After painting a strike zone on the front we were ready to go. We used this portable stickball wall for years. It did occasionally fall forward onto the batter when we didn’t get the lean back of it quite right. But usually in the beginning of the game.

One funny stickball incident came from when we got new neighbors who moved in to the left of Steve (my house was on the right). There were a couple of kids our age and they played stickball with us. At that time we were playing so that we’d hit the ball across Steve’s yards and into the new neighbor’s yard. The new kid’s father used to get pissed that the balls were going into his yard (and in his defense sometimes into his new pool but no one was in it) and he’d come out and yell at us and sometimes cut up our tennis balls. His own kids were hitting the ball into their own yard and getting grief for it. They were a little embarrassed over these incidents.

That did get Steve and I to create a new stickball field turned the other way into my yard. I liked that field best. Between mine and Steve’s yard was a four foot fence. Any ball that made it to the fence was a single but any ball that was caught before the fence was a ground out. A ball hit over the fence was a double and a there was a tree near the edge of my yard that marked triple territory. There was a six foot fence on the far side of my yard and if the ball went over that it was a home run. Those neighbors didn’t mind a tennis ball traveling into their back yard every now and again.

The main quirk of the field was that almost everything had to be hit straight away. There was not much of a left field because that is where my yard ended and behind my yard was a lot of scrub brush. We didn’t want to go chasing balls into there so we made that foul territory. A lot of my power was to left so it cut down on some of my hits. Both of us were righties so not many went to right field.

I was usually second best to Steve in stickball most of the time. I maybe won one of three or four. I was always football first and baseball second and he was the opposite. I’ve always been a good quarterback in football but that is a lot different from pitching. I could make the tennis ball go where ever I wanted it to but that isn’t enough to be a pitcher. You need a curve and a change up too. Steve could make those pitches and I couldn’t. Hitting a curve ball isn’t easy and I had a hard time with it. Steve didn’t have to contend with that because I couldn’t throw one. Hence his edge in wins. I love playing anyway.

It’s odd that a Yes song made me drift back to those days. It’s usually Asia’s self titled album that does that. It was the summer of 1982 (I always remember that because “Now we find ourselves in ’82” was one of the lyrics) and we played that album every day as we played stickball. Good times and music.

Acting versus reacting. That’s the creative conflict that’s been on my mind lately. I like acting. Acting on my own. What I mean by that is when I create things, be they stories, pictures, or anything else I like to come up with stuff on my own. I like to make stuff that no one has seen before. Of course I have influences and after all this time of human existence and people making things very little is new but I like to try. I like to create my own world and not react to somebody else’s.

By reacting I don’t mean being influenced by something or even aping a style but to make something that wouldn’t exist without another person’s creation. Usually a pop culture creation. Things such as reviews of movies or parody in general. A good example of this is the site that does thirty second recaps of popular movies reenacted with cartoon bunnies. It wouldn’t exist without it’s source material: the popular movies. It’s some pretty amusing stuff and I liked watching them but I have no interest in making something like that myself. Too much reacting for me.

I’ve been thinking about the choices involved with the things I make. Every artist wants to be able to make living from his art. That’s the dream. It only happens to the rare few and for the rest of us it’s a puzzle to be figured out. Except it’s actually not a puzzle nor is there a recipe to follow but admitting that it’s just dumb luck gives me nothing to do. It makes my choices and decisions null and void and removes free will. So I’m going to say success is neither a puzzle with a solution nor pure luck. It’s something in between. So that means that my decisions do matter (hey, I’m a dreamer).

The choice I’ve been pondering lately is the action versus reaction one. One of the short cuts to popularity is to react to something already popular. And popularity leads to financial success. The more people who know about what you are doing the more who will be interested in it and who will reward you financially. That’s why companies spend billions a year in advertising. To let people know that they exist in order to get popular and sell stuff.

I have a glass half full/half empty situation. Most of the artwork that I do is of a nature that it will probably not be popular. It’s a little too unexpected as it confronts the unknown a lot. As I’ve been influenced by comics and cartoons my art is made with a line and style that is familiar to people but the imagery is a little too odd. It’s not as comfortable as people want it to be. But that’s the way I want it. That’s what makes me happy and satisfied so that is what I do.

Yet still the influence of wanting to be popular and a financial winner rears its head. As I’m thinking about what to do next with my art I often think of projects that might somehow lead to popularity. They are usually reactive projects piggybacking on to something already proven. None of those type of projects have ever worked out for me. I get bored with them quickly and don’t do a very good job reacting to other people’s ideas. But at the beginning of them I think I can do it. I think I can divine what is popular and imitate it in my own project and create a success. Then it all falls apart. Popularity is not my strength. Being a weirdo is.

I think a lot of talented artists have this problem. What if your strength, what you do best, what you do well, isn’t appreciated by many people? That’s why most artists give up and go do something else. They played to their strengths, gave it their best shot, and nobody cared. They never figured out the puzzle that I say isn’t there. Popular culture passed them by without so much as a glance. It’s a tough world.

If I look around most people are quite willing to react rather than act. Every place I look are books, magazines, web sites, and whole TV channels dedicated to reacting to popular culture. People are quite happy to bask in the glow of and forever dissect their favorite movie or TV show. People devote their energies to them. They use their creativeness to live in a pop culture world that others create. I find this hard to do even when I want to.

So what is the point of all this? I don’t know. That’s why I’m pondering it. Should I try to be popular and make mediocre work? Should I do what my own weird self wants, do good work, and probably never be popular? My own weird self usually wins out but only when money is not too tight so my mind is not filled with Ralph Kramden get rich quick schemes. Those schemes never worked out for him either.