Radiant Comics

I was listening to a Doris Day CD the other day. It was one I hadn’t heard before. I’ve listened to plenty of her music and she’s a favorite of mine. She may be yesterday’s style but she had a great voice and knew how to use it. Plus yesterday’s style is fine with me. I don’t need the latest and the greatest. Just the greatest. But then a strange thing happened. She sang the Simon and Garfunkel tune “Feeling Groovy”. It was awful. I have never heard a Doris Day song that make me cringe like that one did. It got me wondering as to why.

If you’ve ever heard Frank Sinatra’s albums from the Sixties where he sings pop songs from that era then you know the kind of butchery of which I speak. They are terrible. And Sinatra is one of the all time greats. How come these terrific singers can sing a Pop song from the 1860’s but not one from the 1960’s? I think it’s for a few different reasons.

These reasons have nothing to do with the singers but have to do with the songs. They have to do with the universality of song. Pop songs have always been the most broadly liked songs of the land. Hence “Pop” which is short for “Popular”. But since the advent of Rock ‘n Roll, Pop Music has gone from made for adults to made for teenagers. You use to have to go out someplace like a music hall to hear music or have a musician in your family play it for you. These were adult pastimes. Adults made music for other adults who listened to it. Kids liked and listened to songs too but there was an adult universality that permeated Pop Music. Stage Musicals, Ragtime, Jazz, Blues, Big Band, Gospel, Country, and any other kind of Pop Music that I’m forgetting.

Then came Rock ‘n Roll and the record album. Records were around before Rock but now the teenagers could listen to their own music without an adult in the mix. They didn’t need to go out to a club to hear it and they didn’t need an adult to play it on the piano or fiddle. The adult universality of music was slowly eroded until now we have a teenage universality of Pop Music. Nothing in today’s top 20 was written for grown ups. From Hip Hop to Techno it’s all for the kids. It’s tough for adults to sing music made for an ever changing teenage population. That’s why Pop Music is a young person’s game now. Made by the young for the young.

The second reason why those great old singers have trouble with post Rock songs has to do with a change in the nature of Pop song writing. In the 60’s it became less adult universal and more personal. Instead of looking for that great “Fly me to the moon let me play among the stars” poetic lyric that everyone could relate to song writers turned more introspective and personal with their lyrics. I think this started because singers and song writers ceased to be separate people. With the Beatles hitting it big bands were now expected to write their own songs. They started writing personal ones as much as universal ones. Everyone still wants that good universal hook after all. But it came with a more youth centered sentiment. Not an adult one.

The third reason is technological. Bands and song writers had a lot more studio tricks available to them than ever before. Lyrics became a smaller part of the whole production than ever before. In plenty of our favorite songs we don’t even know what all of the lyrics are because they are so garbled or lost in the wall of sound. This was unthinkable in Pop music before Rock took over. You can understand every word that Doris Day or Frank Sinatra sing. In a lot of today’s Pop songs the listener isn’t even meant to hear the words.

That is why when an older singer puts out an album of standards or “evergreens” they are mostly made up of older 60’s and before Pop songs. There are no more evergreens. Songs are so highly produced and dependent on the band that originally wrote them that we only get the “cover version”. That’s when Band 2 does a version of Band 1’s song. Good or bad it’s always compared to Band 1’s song as it was recorded on a highly produced studio album. The concept of a “cover version” didn’t even exist in the 1930’s because a song belonged to the song writer and different singers gave their interpretations in song. There was no “original” and “cover” versions. Just versions.

Even The Beatles, possibly the most influential and popular band of the last fifty years, produced no evergreens. “Let it Be” might come close but every version is still just considered a cover version. And could you imagine someone covering “Hey Jude”? Yeah, I know lots of people have. iTunes is great for looking up such stuff but that song is so dependent on studio production (that’s not a bad thing) that most people just give you their studio production take on it. And if they strip it down it looses what makes it special. It’s the total sound of the song with the lyrics taking a secondary if not tertiary role. I think this is what trips up old time singers. For them their voice and the lyric is primary. With modern Pop music voice and lyric are not nearly as important as production and image. It makes for some cringe worthy interpretations of lyrics that were never meant to be heard as words but heard as sounds. Ouch.

One of the many ongoing projects that I have is a set of fortune telling cards. I have a fascination with fortune telling or, more accurately, fortune telling systems. I certainly don’t believe anyone can predict the future besides in a “tomorrow it will be partly cloudy with showers towards evening” kind of way but I find systems for trying to to pierce the veil of time interesting.

Through science and observation we can predict the future in a basic and macro prediction way. I predict the sun will rise tomorrow morning. I can even give you the time it will rise by referencing a chart. Not much of a stretch but it’s predicting the future none the less. Phases of the moon, the changing of the seasons, and when the birds will migrate are all predicting the future. They’re just so simple to us that people usually don’t even consider them to be special in any way.

But it’s predicting the future in a micro “you will meet a tall handsome stranger” kind of way that I have an interest in. That’s because I have a fascination with systems that are based on nothing. Astrology, palm reading, phrenology, Tarot cards, throwing runes, rolling bones, reading the livers of sheep, and countless other ways to predict famine or fortune all have their own distinct way of looking at the universe and peering into the future. And all of them are based on nothing but imagination.

Predicting the sun will come up tomorrow is based on seeing the sun rise morning after morning. A long time ago someone started taking note of when the sun rose and set and noticed it happened in a repeated pattern. Then someone came up with a way to keep track of that pattern. Hence you can predict when the sun will rise tomorrow. Same with the moon, same with eclipses, and same with a lot of the natural world.

In contrast fortune telling systems are not made that way. Someone had to make them up from scratch. They could not be made up from observation. The basic tarot card system has to be in place before any observations could be made. No one made up all the cards, dealt them out to people, and then followed those people around observing what happened to them all the while taking notes. No, someone made the system out of thin air and then applied it to people. Someone rolled the bones and then just made stuff up. And people believed them. And still do.

So I’ve been working on my own deck of cards and a fortune telling system based on nothing. It’s not as easy as it sounds because there really does need to be a system. A flexible system capable of adapting itself to all sorts of aspects of life. I’m also trying to make my system unique and modern. There is no sense in recreating the Tarot. That already exists. No old fashioned king, queen, and knave stuff either. It’s kind of a tall order. Fun though.

I’ve already done all the illustrations (48 of them) and have the names of each card and some meanings for them. I even came up with a layout for how the cards should be dealt. Now I have to work out how the cards work in conjunction with each other. That’s a tough part. A lot of B.S. is required. I also need to make a good new prototype deck. I haven’t pulled out that project in a while but I think I will. The last thing I did was come up with a name for it. “The Tourmaline” and the instruction book for it is called “The Tourmaline Mystique”. Pretty mysterious, no? I’ve got a future ahead of me as a guru.

Sometimes I like to bid on things at Ebay that I don’t really want to win. Scratch that. Don’t really want to pay for is more like it. I’m no welsher. I’ve paid for every auction I’ve ever won but sometimes I know I’m not going to win. My bid is way too low and way too early. Plus sniping happens.

For those of you who don’t know what sniping is I’ll define it for you. I’m big on defining terms. Sniping is the practice of waiting until the very last minute on an online auction before putting in a bid. That way you avoid a bidding war because no one can out bid you if you are the very last bidder. The danger is that the person who bid before you has a high upper bid and your snipe bid might be too low. Then you run out of time. But these snipers know what they are doing and can quickly raise their bid quite a few times in the last minute.

As a consequence if you are bidding on something that is fairly popular and you have the top bid hours before the auction is over you will rarely have the top bid in the end. That’s what I count on when bidding on things that I really don’t want to pay for. Someone will always snipe me. I watched something I bid on go from $160 to $600 in the last 30 seconds. That was some hard core sniping. I knew it was coming because $160 was way too low for this piece. It was the original art from a 1965 Family Circus Sunday strip. Yeah, I bid on some Family Circus art. Heh, heh, heh…

Sometimes it’s just fun to bid. It’s almost like owning whatever I’m bidding on if even for a brief few hours. It’s a little bit exciting too. Maybe no one will bid it up and I’ll be stuck with it. It’s a weird form of excitement when hoping someone outbids you on an auction. It’s somehow related to buyer’s remorse except nothing has been purchased. Maybe it’s the fear of buyer’s remorse. There sure are a lot of fears in life if that is one of them.

None of the stuff I bid on is very expensive. A couple of hundred dollars at most. I could pay for any of them if I had too. It’s just not in the budget. But I bid anyway. Maybe it’s a cautious person’s way of being reckless? I inevitably get outbid so there is no real danger but there is also disappointment mixed with relief when I get outbid. Relief that I don’t have to spend money that I can’t quite afford and disappointment that I can’t afford it. I wish I could indulge my bidding whims but alas that is not the case. C’est la vie!

I don’t indulge in this kind of bidding behavior often. It’s not an everyday habit. Maybe I bid expecting to be outbid once every couple of months. Something makes me say, “Yeah, I’d pay $120 for that” even though I don’t have the $120 on hand. Even though I know I won’t actually get the item for $120. Even though if the bidding actually stopped right there and I would win buyer’s remorse would set in. Even with all those thing I still make the bid. Sometimes it just gets me thinking about the nature of winning and losing. At least with an auction winning and losing is a cut and dried thing. Sometimes that type of clarity is a help.

One of the things I do is make art prints. Not in a traditional lithographic drawing on a piece of stone way but in a modern computer graphic way. I draw some stuff, scan it in, arrange, and color it on the computer. I much prefer to draw on paper rather than a computer but after scanning the image in I can do things with color and composition that would be hard to duplicate with just paper and paint. It’s an interesting process. Plus it intrigues me not to have an individual original piece of art, as I do with my paintings, but a piece that is meant to be seen in its reproduced form. The final print is the thing. There is no complete “original”. Pieces of original art exist on paper but the whole exists in the world of bits and bytes. And printer ink and paper.

The print is the thing and that is the problem I’ve been having lately. I print on an Epson R1800 inkjet printer which is very nice in an of itself but ink for inkjet printers is about the most expensive liquid on earth. My printer has eight different ink cartridges and one or the other is always running out. It still beats the days when all of the color was on one cartridge and as you ran out of a single color you had to replace them all. But still it gets expensive keeping that printer filled with ink. The paper I use isn’t exactly cheap either.

It’s been that expense which has kept me from printing out all of the prints that I’ve made for the last year or so. But I’ve kept making prints on the virtual level. Drawing, scanning, composing, and coloring. I just didn’t print any up. I think this lead to a fundamental problem. None of them were actually “finished”.

In the self motivated world of art for art’s sake finishing things is very important. You have to see that you are getting something done. That is vital from a morale point of view because money is not the motivator. It’s the making something that’s important. Without making actual printouts of my prints something was lacking. This winter I found that I was having a hard time finishing things. Whether a painting, a print, or a photograph I didn’t seem to be getting much done.

I had plenty of drawings. Stacks of them. It wasn’t like I was doing nothing but once I got into the habit of not printing out my prints that was one less finished thing I had. It also made finishing other things less important. Then I had even less finished things and meandered without direction more often. There is something to be said for aimless wandering but too much of it is disorienting.

So this week I finished up and printed out two new prints. It felt good and made my art morale go higher. Now I’ve been going back and getting the twenty or so prints I’ve made ready to print out. That’s always a lot more work than I think. Getting something to print up pretty takes technical work that I don’t think about as I’m in the creative process. Gritty, moving things around, setting proper margins, entering numbers, and getting the blacks right kind of work. Nothing exciting and quite tedious. But after I get some more ink and paper it will all be worth it. Some things will be finished.

I’ve had this head cold/sinus thing going on for the past week and a half. Nothing terrible or life threatening but enough to make my days uncomfortable to miserable (on a sliding scale). It’s the kind of thing that wouldn’t keep someone from going into work but would slow you down. It doesn’t stop you in your tracks like a flu but they’ll be no spring in your step.

I actually find it pretty easy to go into work with a cold because what choice would I have? People go into work with mild sicknesses all the time because it’s expected of them. Being sick is considered “unproductive” in our “work work work” society unproductive is the ultimate corporate sin. So it ends up that it’s the self motivated stuff that suffers with my decline.

Being an artist and working on an endless amount of projects that bring no immediate financial gain means that self motivation is a big factor. Let’s face it most people don’t do things unless they are getting paid for it. Getting paid is an excellent motivational factor. It might only be beaten out by love, lust, or loyalty but then again for many people money comes in number one.

So I finished up some paying work I was doing earlier in the week. Cold or no cold if I didn’t do it I wouldn’t get paid for it (there’s that money motivation for you). I took it easy and paced myself. When not sick I have a tendency to work long hours on the paying stuff to get it done as soon as possible. That way I can make time for my own self motivated un-paying work. But this week I did a little at a time and rested a lot. I was feeling better and getting stronger with each day of the week. And then Friday came.

I had the day ahead of me and was caught up on my paying jobs. I wanted to do some work on some prints I’ve been making and was looking forward to it. But man I couldn’t wake up. I got out of bed and got ready for my day but wow my head was cloudy. Even with some more of the medicine that had helped me earlier in the week I lacked clarity. If I had been going into a job that day I would have. What choice would I have had? But a cold completely kills self motivation. There’s no energy for it. So I had to just sit around doing nothing.

Some people are good at sitting around and doing nothing. I’m not one of them. I like to do something. I’m not the kind who needs someone or something to entertain me. I also don’t need to be going somewhere to be doing something. I’m much more interested in being interested than in being entertained. I like to spend my time painting, drawing, or doing something generally creative. I like to make things. So when I have to sit around and do nothing I get antsy. So Friday I alternately took naps and got antsy. Antsy isn’t good. It burns up what little energy I have.

When I’m working I usually have the TV on or some music playing. But when I’m doing nothing I can’t concentrate on movies or music. In between my naps I kept trying to find something to watch, since I had no energy, but nothing could hold my interest. Those are days that make life seem empty. Nothing to do no where to go and no energy for anything anyway. Being sick just sucks.

I think that is why I never liked medical dramas. Whether in print or in the moving pictures I’ve always failed to see any drama in sickness. In my book illness just sucks. Period. I find nothing dramatic about sickness at all. I especially hate when a TV show throws in a character with a terminal illness (Battlestar Galactica I’m talking to you) and you just know that later on in the season they are going to find some magic cure for the illness. And they do.

Sure the excitement for these stories is in the cure but I fail to find any entertainment value because the misery of the sickness distracts me too much. Usually these shows give you the “drama” of the sickness and then the excitement of the cure. I just see fifty minutes of misery and then ten minutes of inevitable pre-programed happiness. The fifty minutes of misery just remind me how cruel and empty life can be when you’re sick. People who like medical dramas must like the sense of hope at the end of them. That’s not enough for me to sit through all the misery.

So I made it through my sad little minor sickness and day of getting nothing done. I’m glad it doesn’t happen often but I gotta get better at doing nothing.