Hello, I’m Benjamin Taggart…
I’m an illustrator, author, and former performer who’s lived in six cities (between four states). I’ve worked in circuses, carnivals, and kitchens. I’ve met the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I’ve recently spent four years crawling into my own head then out again to write a 110,000 word novel about an introverted artist who learns to see through alien eyes.
About My Three Sites…
(April 13th, 2024)
All I wanted from Yola, Wix, or WordPress was a simple blog, but I somehow wound up designing three websites.
Yola was by far the easiest to work with, and I would've been glad to stick with it, but as soon as I published the site I noticed the domain name: kyfpke-soewqaxfgi-bhgfdsr.yolasite.com... WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!?
I expected a subdomain like: something-people-can-remember.yola.com, but as of 2024, Yola requires users to either pay for their sites, or get stuck with a bunch of utterly useless, random letters and dashes (and there's no way to change it).
So I wrote an angry email to them complaining that the hours I spent designing my free site were a complete waste of time, and then I actually deleted the site's original version and tried Wix.
Wix was also easy enough to use, but again, they screw you on the domain unless you pay, so I tried WordPress. And although WordPress does allow users to pick/edit their free domains, the user interface was a nightmare to figure out... then I remembered a line from my upcoming novel, "If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’." And it occurred to me to use the WordPress site as an easy to remember homepage, providing links to external sites that were easier to design... then I remembered what my novel was about... understanding different perspectives... and it occurred to me to take advantage of the three sites by designing/writing content from the three types of perspectives I used to create the story's characters: id, ego, and superego...
Yola is the id site, meaning that for literary purposes its content is derived from the part of my mind in which (by anatomical default) the primary, innate, and instinctive impulses are most manifest... emotions are raw and unfiltered, and the primary perspective is unfortunately selfish... that means it sounds crazy... because it's supposed to.
It's also unfortunate that although Yola is easy to get started with, the platform doesn't really have a blog function. All I can do is combine words and pictures in a way that resembles a blog. But, rather than whine about it, I'm taking advantage of it by writing "blog" entries in whatever order I choose.
My progress here can't be subscribed to, and entries are made at random dates, but the story they tell should always be read from top to bottom.
About My First Posters…
(June 11th, 2024)
I was living in the great city of Seattle, renting a room in The Husky Neighborhood (for $350 a month), and I was eking out a living as a street performer/children's entertainer when a friend of mine who owned a bike shop decided she wanted to open an art gallery.
She wanted to host a big event to get the gallery going, and since I'd done a little event managing for a circus-themed performance troupe, we decided that I'd take the lead in event planning... that meant learning to do a lot of different things, including how to use a free graphic design program called GIMP.
My friend gave up on the gallery idea when she found out that it'd be hard work, but GIMP made graphic design easy, and that meant I was crazy about it. But, with zero experience and no gallery to design for, I really didn't know where to begin... so I decided to invent a few bands, and start making fictional posters just for practice.
Another friend of mine (who was studying for a career in medicine) had the hilariously bad habit of using the word receptors in every conversation. And when, while drinking, he used the term protein receptors, I decided, while drunk, that that'd be a great name for a band.
I know that I'm supposed to be writing this from the perspective of the id, which means I should be writing this without any reservation. But, now that I can start to see other people's perspectives, it's hard not to be embarrassed by my early work... because I made a lot of the same mistakes that I'd later see in the work of other amateurs... including the excessive use of multiple fonts and cheesy, very lowbrow humor. But it's only with practice that any artist can hope to make their work approach perfection, and I had to start somewhere.
My first posters were black and white, because they were cheap to print. But once I started gaining confidence with basic design and layout, I started experimenting with color... this is another fake poster I made for a friend, who had a real band, but that band had been broken up for several years by the time I met him...
As a Seattleite, I was familiar with the name Art Chantry, and was experimenting with his vintage meets grunge style, as well as the text-heavy/silkscreen style of Hatch Show Print...
I did a lot of work using collage, but it wasn't until I discovered the artwork of Jay Ryan that I began to think about putting my own art on posters... and that's when I started having real fun...
Some of the lines on the above poster may look black at first glance, but they're actually a dark purple... and this may sound silly, but even though I'd been using black on previous posters, I wasn't yet conscious of the idea that black is a color. So when I started using color to bring life to my own art, I actually went out of my way to avoid black. Here's another example of a blackless poster that I made for a fictional band that I called Odd God...
The point of Odd God was to visually explore my life-long interest in mythology. The image above takes its motifs from Chinese mythology, using the male dragon as a symbol for the emperor, and the female fenghuang (A.K.A the Chinese phoenix) as a symbol for the empress... the hat on the hermaphrodite's head was inspired by the traditional costumes of the Peking Opera...
I made a lot of Odd God posters, utilizing motifs from a lot of different cultures. And when I started to run out of real-world cultures to explore, I turned to pure fiction, drawing from one of my favorite authors... Mr. H. P. Lovecraft...
The image above depicts Wilbur Whateley's Twin... a creature/character from my all-time favorite Lovecraft story, The Dunwich Horror. I'll write more about my interest in Lovecraft later, but for the purpose of this blog entry I want to focus on the poster's color.
Blue isn't an easy color to work with. For some strange reason it's almost always the last color term to enter languages, and for some completely other reason it often looks radically different in print than on my screen. So, since I was committed to using blue to color Whateley's Twin, I struggled to come up with complimentary/neutral background colors. And after a lot of trial and error, I wound up using gray and black. And after staring at the final draft for an obsessively long time, I finally thought, "Black is a color!" And the conscious realization was so exciting that I practically wanted to run into the streets naked, screaming like Archimedes when he famously exclaimed, "EUREKA!!!"
I didn't, but from that point on, black became an essential favorite in many of my posters, both real and fake... this one was real...
About My First "Work" As A Gonzo Journalist…
(May 8th, 2024)
I was still living the great city of Seattle, and had recently moved into a beat up old building across the street from a community center in the U District. The building was called The Monarch, and it was home to a number of musicians, artists, and other drunks, including a harry young bartender/writer named Jake Uitti who lived in the building's basement... which was the official office of an online arts and literary magazine that he named The Monarch Review.
One of the building's other denizens had seen my poster work and suggested I knock on Jake's door... Jake loved the posters and immediately asked me to draw a picture of someone named Robert Hardgrave, a Seattle-based artist whom Jake had chosen to profile for a series of articles (being written for one or more other, real magazines) about local heroes...
Jake's idea was to combine pictures and text in a way that looked like old fashioned comic-book trading cards. The idea was sound, though the execution wasn't very interesting, but I stuck with it because I thought it might lead to something... and it did... when I finally got tired of drawing nice pictures, of nice people, who did nice things.
So, because Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas was/is one of my all time favorite movies, and thus Hunter Thompson was/is one of my personal heroes, I asked Jake if I could try illustrating and writing some articles of my own. And since there was almost nothing that The Monarch Review wouldn't publish at the time, Jake shrugged his hairy shoulders and said, "Okay."
Apart from all the alcohol I had to consume, my first article was relatively easy. It took place at a long-gone concert venue called The Josephine, which was somehow also a house (with rooms for rent), and the long story made short is that after writing about the evening's concert from the perspective of just some schmuck in the audience, I parlayed the article into a subsequent interview with the evening's headlining band...
The Fabulous Downey Brothers have since gone on to do great things, but I met them when they were still hauling their own gear between the boonies and the sticks... again, alcohol was a necessity... and again, working on a long-term plan, I parlayed the interview into a subsequent article about a circus-themed cabaret...
Followed by another article about a steampunk artist who loved Lovecraft...
I wasn't getting paid for my time, but I was on my way...
About My Favorite Article…
(June 2nd, 2024)
My first introduction to the works of H. P. Lovecraft was through a 1970 Roger Corman movie that I watched on SyFy (way back in the olden times, when the channel's name was spelled properly).
Judging from the movie's opening credits, The Dunwich Horror was probably made in an attempt to jump on the same bandwagon as Rosemary's Baby, The Devil Rides Out, and Bedazzled, all appealing to the then popular interest in Satanism and the occult. But, despite the opening credits' hypnotically Satanic animation, there were no Satanists in the film... just Dean Stockwell reading passages from a stolen copy of a forbidden book called The Necronomicon to a wide-eyed (and very receptive) Sandra Dee.
It wasn't a very faithful adaptation of the original story, but it was unlike any horror movie I'd ever seen, retaining just enough of Lovecraft's original ideas to keep me captivated by the promise of seeing beings from a different dimension.
Years later I was equally captivated by Stuart Gordon's film Dagon (an adaptation of Lovecraft's novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth), but it wasn't until years after that that I came across an illustration of something as ridiculous as it was otherworldly in Barlowe's Guide To Extraterrestrials...
And that's what finally hooked me, because until then, although I'd seen Lovecraft's work in other media, Barlowe's book was the first opportunity I'd had to hold something in my hand, and to read the name... Lovecraft... over and over again... Lovecraft... and I wanted to learn everything I could about the man and mind capable of imagining such a strange thing.
So I started researching, reading short stories, downloading PDFs, and illegally downloading MP3s. But my search for illegal MP4s was perpetually interrupted by a series of insane videos on YouTube featuring some freak wearing Boy George makeup, or red and green face paint, or something even weirder...
And since my research was serious, I wrote the weird freak off, assuming that he was just some bohemian internet lunatic who probably danced around naked with his dozen-plus cats after washing down handfuls of prescription mood stabilizers with a quart of tequila... which means it wasn't until even more years later, after I'd started interviewing North West personalities for The Monarch Review, that I finally (accidentally) discovered who the freak really was... Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire...
The above picture shows Pugmire wearing one of his most famous faces, Count Pugsly (deliberately spelled without an E), a character he invented while working at Jones' Fantastic Museum in the great city of Seattle. The museum's gone, but Pugmire played that character for more than a decade, haunting its hallowed halls to the delight of children of all ages, and carving out a place for his name in history long before YouTube was even invented.
If you want to learn more about him, check out his blog, the appreciation page on Facebook, or the free article I wrote/illustrated for The Monarch Review (because I'm proud to say that that particular article is currently cited as one of the references on Pugmire's hard-won Wikipedia page). But the short story is that like me and countless others, Pugmire was seduced by Lovecraft's writing, eventually carving out a new name for himself as a Lovecraftian author. However, rather than focusing on the man, this blog entry is more about my feelings for him.
I was impressed with his sincerity when I met him. It's easy to slap the name Cthulhu on something and pretend to be a Lovecraft fan... I've met people who did it for business reasons... but Pugmire was the real deal, and now that I've taken the time to watch some of his insane videos, I've grown to love him.
I love him as a fellow author, and (in a weird way) I love him like the eccentric grandma I never knew I had... he wore a grandma's glasses, he (and everything he touched) smelled of perfume, and he was possibly the kindest, most benevolent author of cosmic horror to ever leap out of the shadows on a moonlit night... I've even begun illegally downloading some of his videos from YouTube.
He's dead now.
He's been dead for several years, and it sucks, because out of all the people that I interviewed for The Monarch, Pugmire was the most extraordinary... the only, truly genuine freak that I've ever known.
I'm sure that on one hand, my articles were an excuse for adventure, or an effort to see/experience something fantastic. But on the other hand, they were a search for fantastic people... ironically the same kind of people that Pugmire wrote about... artists, dreamers... fellow creatives and fellow seekers... and it's one of my greatest regrets that I didn't stay in touch with him after our interview, because I worry now that he might've died alone, and I know now that I could've learned a lot from him, and I even empathize with him now that can I see (too late) the struggles that he and I have had in common... two lonely writers, probably more at home among their own creations than in the real world.
I don't have many worldly possessions... having moved (and moved) so many times over the years that I've unfortunately come to think of most possessions as just useless junk that take too much time to pack and unpack. But I still have the book Pugmire gave to me when I met him...
Between Amazon and Goodreads, The Strange Dark One has a good rating overall. But even among Pugmire's fans it's still regarded as a terrible example of his writing, because it's filled with numerous typos, spelling, and grammatical errors, in addition to being filled with weird style preferences like double-spacing after every word that ends with an F. But my copy is signed:
And if there are any typos in that, they can kiss my ass, because the book remains one of my greatest treasures... however... as it really is almost painful to read... I recently wrote to one of Pugmire's friends and colleagues, S. T. Joshi, who was kind enough to recommend the following tomes, on the basis that they were competently proofread...
Monstrous Aftermath is a collection of short stories, many of which are set in Pugmire's original contribution to the mythos, Sesqua Valley, and at least one of which features Simon Gregory Williams, an original character based on the author's most hated ex-boyfriend...
And An Imp Of Aether, another collection of shorts, spanning the spectrum of Pugmire's work from the 1980s to the decade of his death in 2019...
And, if you can find it, I personally recommend Bohemians Of Sesqua Valley. Legend has it that when Pugmire visited Lovecraft's birthplace (in Providence, Rhode Island), he walked the streets with a notebook in hand, scratching impressions as he went. He then used those notes to write the above collection of six novelettes, at least one of which features Marceline Dubois, a favorite among Pugmire fans that the author specifically created to address the lack of compelling female characters in his favorite author's work.
About My Last Gonzo Articles…
(May 14th, 2024)
Being an unlicensed journalist wasn't paying the bills. So, while volunteering for The Monarch Review, I worked as an unlicensed dishwasher. And shortly after finishing my interview with W. H. Pugmire, the kitchen I was working in closed for a day to host an all-staff safety meeting... at which I (ironically) twisted my ankle.
So I spent the next few weeks either in bed or hopping between bed and my writing desk, trying to research an article that didn't require going outside...
The faceless creature pictured above is one of the many avatars of H. P. Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep, drawn here with three legs, and a giant tongue for a head. It's one of the most popular versions of the fictional god, and yet that particular combination of anatomical anomalies isn't something Lovecraft described in his writing... not even once... not ever.
So I wondered where the idea came from, illegally downloading as much research material as I could find while simultaneously emailing as many Lovecraftian authors and fiction fans as I could get a hold of, ultimately discovering that although one person in particular had invested a lot of time and energy into making fans think he came up with the idea, it was actually the almost accidental invention of an unsung (and very reclusive) female artist.
Unfortunately, by order of the aforementioned time-and-energy-wasting person, I was summarily ostracized by the Lovecraft community for dissonance... so I decided to switch gears...
It was an election year, and the nation was on edge. So before diving headfirst into the edgy world of politics, I decided to test the waters by focusing on someone who was much more political than I, a Portland-based activist and cop watcher, who, for lack of a better term, was operating under the name Mike BlueHair.
Meeting Mike was an eye-opening experience. It was also a great way to get the lay of land while visiting the repellent, execrable-obscenity of Portland Oregon... which I needed to do since Seattle's minimum wage had recently been voted up to $15 an hour... which gave Seattle's landlords the perfect opportunity to raise everyone's rent. In fact, the building I was living in had recently been sold to a real estate investment firm that was determined to triple my rent in as little as nine months. So, completely unaware of how sh*tty the city was, I was eyeballing Portland as a proverbial port in the potential storm.
Mike's whirlwind tour through the dark side of Portland turned out to be one of my most successful articles, and it gave me the confidence to focus on the election. So, considering Canada as another move-to option, I stuffed a backpack with my most precious worldly goods, exchanged as much cash as I could carry into Canadian dollars, and got on a bus headed for The Great White North... because I was determined to write the great Canadian article on Election 2016... and if Trump won, I was determined to stay.
But after spending the night of the election in Vancouver BC, and being subsequently devastated to learn that I was ineligible for Canadian citizenship on the grounds of being an unlicensed (and underpaid) dishwasher, I was further devastated to learn that Jake Uitti, my hairy editor, refused to publish anything too political on the grounds that he didn't want to help start the second Civil War.
And I couldn't blame him... because while I was trying to hide my American tale (between my American legs), safe and secure on the bus ride home from Canada, Seattle citizens were protesting, marching out of class, and onto the city's many roads and highways to express their anger.
I shared their anger, but instead of throwing a flaming garbage can through Jake's basement-level window, I threw a creative fit... deciding instead to write something I thought would be on Jake's level...
The above picture is actually something I made recently (using original source material) in order to make the story available to you online... just follow this link to read the interactive flip book (100% free) on AnyFlip... because that's the only way anyone can read it after Jake gave it the proverbial thumbs down.
He just wasn't down with politics, and there was no shiny candy wrapper I could wrap politics into to change his mind. So I sold the election article to a Canadian magazine, and watched in helpless horror as the depraved, non-Canadian, and hideously-ghoulish bat-creature posing as that magazine's senior news editor used his cellphone to edit over 1,000 words of my work out, mutating it into something written from an inexplicably present-tense perspective... this is what the bat-creature looked like...
It's also what my original illustration looked like, before the next vain, beastly, skunk ape of an excuse for an editor f*cked it up by adding a bunch of stupid stars and text.
That beast was actually the editor in chief of another magazine, called GonzoToday. But because I have nothing but the highest respect for that fine publication's other contributors, I'll leave the beastly skunk ape's name out of this rant... choosing instead to rant about the fact that, despite my many attempts to convince the beast otherwise, he still thinks all of my original illustrations made it into his interpretation of my article... but to this day, all I ever see are a bunch of broken image icons... like this...
But you can see the other two illustrations here...
And here...
The above illustration is of a gentleman named James Filippelli, founder and former leader of one of Canada's most progressive, third political parties. And if I have anything kind to say about the beastly skunk ape addicted to posing for photos on X (formerly known as Twitter), it's that he was at least gracious enough to copy and paste my words as the gods of journalism intended... finally giving James the recognition he deserves.
Unfortunately, by that time I'd become disenchanted, if not disgusted with the process of publishing... so I wrote another low-content story for Jake at The Monarch Review...
He published it... but by that time Jake and I were at odds. So I decided to start thinking outside the box.
The Misadventures Of Billy: The Irredeemably Iconoclastic Goat was my last Monarch article, and you can read it (free) online in The Monarch Review... or you can follow this link to read the interactive flip book (also free) on AnyFlip... but before you do, I have one more thing to rant about...
Trump had won the battle, but the second Civil War had yet to begin, and I had yet to give up the fight. So I came up with a li'l comic strip (pictured above) that I called Li'l Donnie Chump.
Over a dozen installments were drawn and inked in newspaper-friendly black and white before I tried submitting the idea to every allegedly-progressive paper across the country. And of those, only one had the courage to give the strip consideration. But the editor of that rag wanted me to change the shape of the strip from the standard size (used to create Calvin And Hobbes, Peanuts, etc.) to a custom size used by that particular paper's advertising department... the idea being that when advertisers weren't buying enough space, my strip would fill in the gaps.
The idea was too much of an insult, so, like too many of my own ideas, I set Li'l Donnie aside and forgot about it... but you can read the strip online (for free) by following this link to a special gallery on my DeviantArt site.
About My First Book…
(April 22nd, 2024)
My first book, A Tale Of Two Beggars, is a perfect example of writing from the perspective of the id, in that it made perfect sense to me, but probably made no sense to anyone else.
On this site's homepage, I describe it as being written during the 2016 presidential election as an insanely misguided attempt to seduce Jill Stein... which is completely true.
I never met Jill, but I had the honor of living in Seattle during her first presidential campaign, and I even went to a rally (on the University Of Washington's campus) at which she was supposed to speak. But when I got there, her campaign manager informed everyone that Jill was sick and therefore unable to attend.
Latter, I spent the night of the election in Canada, and even though Jill didn't win, I'd already fallen for her from a distance. So I decided to try and close that distance by using my skills as a reporter to track down her and her manager's home addresses.
The plan was to write/illustrate a politically-themed picture book for adults, mail the hard copy, and hope that Jill would be interested in having me write and/or illustrate another book espousing Green Party political ideals.
I unfortunately know next to nothing about politics, so, although there are references to third-party politics in the book, its final direction was more philosophical.
I never heard back from Jill (or anyone else in the party) after mailing the manuscript's original copies, but completing the book felt great, and even though I'm certain it'd be considered nightmarish by most adults, I had tons of fun with its eye catching, minimalist artwork... here's a sample page...
The book is about the road to enlightenment, and in its first few pages the two beggars come to a crossroad, where they meet a magic mirror, who asks them what path they'll take. Shortly after choosing the high road, the first beggar finds himself in a position to consider religion, and these are the religious icons I chose to work with...
The cephalopod in the jar is just a hackneyed Lovecraft reference, but the golden apple inscribed with the word kallisti is in reverent reference to Discordianism, a contemporary religion embracing the ideas of Eris (the Greek goddess of strife and discord)...
The pipe-smoking gentleman in the framed picture is the slackadaisical Bob Dobbs, i.e. the savior/figurehead of The Church Of The Subgenius, another contemporary faith, sharing similar ideology, but completely separate iconography from Discordianism...
And this happy fellow is just a skull, but the colander on his head represents Pastafarianism, another fine faith that I believe actually originated in the great city of Seattle.
Later in the book, the second beggar encounters two children, both of whom ask him to tell them a story...
The accompanying text originally read:
But when I went through the manuscript again, I decided to rewrite the text as:
I'm not sure why I added the paragraph break, but I do know that having recently spent four years writing a novel, I got real tired of running into what I call the he said/she said parallax, i.e., as a reader, I hate not knowing who said something until after I've read it. So, as a writer, I like to provide some kind of flowery description to preface non-illustrated dialogue. That way the reader can clearly envision who's saying what, and how they're saying it. An example from my upcoming novel would be:
Granted, the above excerpt doesn't include a full physical description of J.R., but by that time in the story readers are well-aware that he's a pale, four-foot tall, pot-bellied alien with an unusually long, and pointed head (wearing a white, paint-splattered bathrobe). But I didn't include the above picture just to talk about how I write dialogue. What's important about the pictured moment in the book is that the second beggar was asked to tell a story that included dragons, because (as pictured) the two children like to imagine themselves as dragon heroes... which makes me wonder... what is my job as a writer? Is it to provide a fantasy/entertaining escape for the reader? Is it to make money by telling people what they want to hear?
I honestly don't know. But A Tale Of Two Beggars was written long before those questions were even considered. And (apart from trying to seduce Jill Stein) I used the story as an opportunity to explore the theme of enlightenment... which brings me to this...
It's the second to last illustration in the book. The first beggar has unburdened himself of his heavy load, and, having successfully reached the end of the high road, he's able to look down and see the whole world... which brings me to this...
The World, or The World Card, is the final step in something called, The Fool's Journey, the allegorical story told by the 22 Major Arcana cards in the traditional Tarot deck about an innocent, but open-minded fool who passes through a series of choices, lessons, and archetypal staging-posts that typify the challenges we all face on our journey from birth to enlightenment... note the card's Roman numeral, XXI, which is the same numeral engraved on the beggar's telescope.
I've been interested in Tarot for a long time, and I've been especially interested in The Fool's Journey. I only reference it consciously on the above page from the picture book, but it became a central theme in my novel, and, because I like to make things complicated, I even expanded on the journey by adding cards (from the imaginary deck of the novel's alien culture) to support a new allegorical story that I call, The Sorcerer's Journey... which theoretically never ends... which is a subject for another blog entry... but I hope you've enjoyed this entry, and I hope you'll enjoy A Tale Of Two Beggars, available now on Amazon.
About My Worst Seattle Posters…
(May 10th, 2024)
Being an unlicensed Gonzo journalist was fun for a lot of reasons... it gave me an excuse to go places I would otherwise never go, to talk to people I would otherwise never talk to, and to hold my head high whenever I made an ass of myself in public.
But I continued trying to make a name for myself as a graphic designer/poster artist. And although my work in that regard was often appreciated, I was amazed at how often it wasn't... here's an example of a poster I made before realizing that black was a color...
6 Demon Bag was the name of a soul/jazz/funk band that had one or more of its members renting a room in the same house where a friend of mine (who wasn't a member) lived in North Ballard.
I probably begged my friend to show them my work, but, whether I did or didn't, they loved it when they saw it... until they saw the above poster, featuring slightly demonic little soul/jazz/funk musicians in semi-traditional Chinese clothing.
I remember looking on the band's social-media pages for visual inspiration, and, finding nothing, finally deciding to draw something based solely on the band's name... which (for those of you who don't know) was a reference to one of the greatest movies ever made... Big Trouble In Little China...
The reference is obvious if you've seen the movie, but, to my surprise, no one in the band had... which meant they just thought it was a cool phrase... which meant they had no idea why I'd drawn anything even remotely Chinese on their poster.
They reluctantly used the free poster I gave them to advertise their show, but when I tried to apologize for the misunderstanding by showing them a mock-up poster I'd worked harder on... they still hadn't seen the movie, and therefore still didn't get it...
I still wasn't using black as a color, but I thought I did a pretty cool drawing of a big demon, because, unlike the band's members, I like doing research and knowing what things mean. The big guy pictured above is a combination of two traditional Chinese elements... a Chinese foo dog, or guardian lion...
And a Chinese terracotta warrior (from Emperor Qinshihuang's mausoleum in Lintong District, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China)...
It also features a my-little-pony version of one of my favorite creatures from Chinese mythology... a qilin...
As well as a pretty good caricature of Egg Shen, one of the leading charters in the aforementioned movie...
But since no one in the band had seen the aforementioned movie... my art from their perspective was just a bunch of weird Asian sh*t. So they basically told me to f*ck off.
Of course, after I told them about the movie (from which the band's name was taken), they all decided to watch it, and then they all decided that they loved it... and from that point on, all their advertising looked like this...
I didn't think it was possible to get the aspect ratio wrong on a poster, but they somehow managed to make it happen... great job guys! Here's another of my greatest misses...
The headlining band is called Warning: Danger! And they used to be one of my favorite safety-themed punk bands from Seattle. The above poster was done after I figured out that black is color, and the poster's hand-drawn imagery is inspired by one of the band's best songs, Cougar Attack. But, although the poster was made for a real show, and although most of the band members loved it, it was never actually used, because one band member hated it.
His name is unimportant. But he has a bootleg copy of Photoshop, and that's enough to convince him that he's an artist. So the only thing he actually hated about my poster was the fact that he didn't design it... here's the poster he designed for the same event...
And when I use the term designed, I of course use it euphemistically, because (in case you've never seen the movie), this poster was originally designed by a real artist in 1982...
All the hateful band member did was Photoshop some stock art together with a few logos (and about 10 different fonts), because that's all it took for the useless schmuck to keep living in denial as the band's sole graphic designer... here's another of my own, colossal failures...
Tired of dealing with bands, I'd been designing posters for a venue near my home in the U District... all of them successful... as was the above example, until the headline band saw it.
Kurly Somthing (deliberately misspelled) was a two-man band/performance art group that I'd had the pleasure of encountering before, along with T-Rox, whom I'd actually had the pleasure of interviewing on a separate occasion. I liked both groups, but someone in Kurly Somthing definitely didn't like my artwork... again, for no reason other than the fact that it wasn't his own...
The above picture shows two people wearing papier-mâché masks, each created by the aforementioned band member (and no, that's not me drunk in the middle). The group doesn't do it for every show, but they sometimes wear the masks on stage, or have the masks on display as props on the side... I thought the masks were cool... I wanted to draw them... so I did. But when the masks' original artist saw my cartoon version of them, HE DROPPED OUT OF THE SHOW!
I had to scramble at the last minute to design something else, with T-Rox headlining, and even I didn't like the result, so T-Rox Photoshopped something together using art they'd previously stolen for the cover of one of their albums... I think it looked like this...
But I can't actually find the poster online now... so I guess no one liked it.
About My First Portland Posters…
(May 6th, 2024)
Rent at The Monarch was continuing to rise, so after spending a few nights in a motel (where every room smelled like cigarettes), I rented a very cold room in an unheated house from an insane female security guard who had six dogs and a raging case of attention deficit disorder. And the very first poster I made after getting settled was for a band called Giants In The Trees... well... technically it was for the venue, because by this time I'd learned the hard way to never deal with bands.
Still... I always look online for some sort of aesthetic direction, and though I couldn't really wrap my head around the band's branding, I liked the name, and thought, "Bigfoot is a kind of giant... I'll draw Bigfoot."
So I drew Bigfoot...
I don't know if the band liked the poster, because I never dealt with them, but I do remember that people liked it on the venue's social-media pages, and my contact at the club gave me a huge credit at the bar in appreciation. But, for some reason, he never responded to additional emails when I asked about doing more posters... so I moved on.
The room I was renting was arguably close to a venue called the The Twilight Cafe And Bar (or the Twilight Cafe & Bar, depending on where you read it). I emailed the bar expressing an interest in exchanging my skills as an artist/graphic designer for a free meal and/or a few free drinks. And, as usual, the club's booking manager responded affirmatively.
The first poster he asked me to make was for a band called Decent Criminal, and, after looking at the band's social-media sites, I again designed a colorful poster based almost entirely on their name...
I write almost entirely because I didn't see anything on the band's sites that would indicate an interest in Hinduism. But I've had a life-long interest in India and East Indian culture, and often create the opportunity to indulge that interest artistically.
When I finally went into the bar to collect on my free meal and/or drinks, the booking manager was there, and I was treated like royalty. I got pretty wasted, but remember an Ethiopian girl walking up to my table and asking me to dance because her boyfriend didn't like to.
I like dancing, but don't actually know how, so the girl and I had a good time and a good laugh while I pretended... that night is one of my few fond memories of living in this sh*t-hole excuse for a burg.
Then there was the PDX Adult Soapbox Derby... probably a fun event, but definitely an administrative sh*t-show. I made two posters for them... here's the first...
I contacted the event's administrators months in advance, just asking if they had a designer for the 2018 derby, but when over a month went by without my receiving a response, I decided to light a fire under their asses by designing the above poster, then emailing it... and it worked... meaning that when they finally responded to tell me that they loved the poster, they also told me that they'd already hired a graphic designer who just hadn't gotten off his (or her) ass to finish the job. But they were kind enough to invite me to try again the following year... by the way, here's what the 2018 designer came up with...
There's nothing really wrong with it... except for the fact that the designer didn't work to hard (i.e. the artwork is virtually all stock, whereas my draft was hand drawn)... and that it doesn't fit standard print dimensions (i.e. it's almost two inches short of filling an 11"x17" poster, and almost two inches bigger than an 8.5"x11" flyer)... oh, and he (or she) forgot to include the event's date.
So I waited until the following year, and after waiting, and waiting, and waiting for a response to my email, this is what was sent:
And this is what I came up with...
And after waiting, and waiting, and waiting... this was their response:
I think purple, green, and gold are pretty bold. But as an artist I admit to being unusually aware of color, and am therefore likely to perceive it differently than most people... however... no dogs?
NO DOGS?!?
I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that roughly one quarter of the people living in this piss-jug town own dogs. HOW THE HELL WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT THE EVENT ORGANIZERS DIDN'T WANT DOGS ON THE POSTER?!? IT'S LIKE SAYING NO BUTTERFLIES, OR NO HAPPY FAMILIES, AND IF I'D BEEN TOLD ANY OF THOSE THINGS AHEAD OF TIME, I'D HAVE KNOWN! BUT I WASN'T! AND MY WHOLE ENTIRE CONCEPT WAS BASED ON ANTHROPOMORPHIC, F*UCKING DOGS!!! WHAT THE F*CK WERE THEY THINKING?!?
Until that point my time was strictly volunteer. But when they wanted me to start over, from scratch, I decided my time was more valuable. So I told them that they could have the DOG poster for free, but that if they wanted me to start over every time some idiot came up with another reason for me to do so, they'd have to pay me... and they agreed... but by that time I'd lost all interest, and decided to let them wait, and wait, and wait for a reply... which I never bothered to give them.
So they found another designer, and this is what that person came up with...
It looks like it fits on an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper. And though I don't think the artwork is very compelling, at least the flyer has a date on it... it also has a bear on it... and a toucan... so I guess that means it's OK to bring bears and toucans to the event... but watch out... there may be a few tsunamis to contend with.
About My Second Book…
(April 21st, 2024)
My second book, A New Friend For Chanda And Chapal, is a perfect example of writing from the ego's perspective... I've had a life-long interest in India and East Indian culture, and although much of the book was meant to indulge that interest, the project overall was my first real attempt to write something that someone else would enjoy.
I unfortunately wasn't enjoying my new living situation. So I moved out of the very cold house, away from the insane female security guard, and into a different house in Portland's up-and-coming St. Johns neighborhood... where I turned out to be the only tenant with a job, and thus the only tenant who ever left the house while the progressive and forward-thinking couple I was renting from stayed home all day (every day) to get high and unschool their maladjusted offspring.
It was a major adjustment for me, but the time I spent avoiding my housemates and their two lonely kids gave me plenty of time to write/illustrate a story about two other kids who create an imaginary friend.
Chanda and Chapal's imaginary friend looks like a monster. And if you're a Westerner, it might've occurred to you that he's colored with red, purple, and gold, i.e. the exact-same colors used to depict The Whore Of Babylon... to which I'd like to respond by drawing your attention to the following image...
This is an illustration from a popular story in Hindu culture, and when I first encountered it, I saw a muscle-bound hero fighting a horrific monster. Here's another illustration from the same story...
Pretty dang gruesome... but (believe it or not) the lion "monster" is actually the good guy.
His name is Narasimha, one of the ten avatars of the god Vishnu, who is the great protector of the universe and the savior of mankind. The muscle-bound hero is actually the bad guy... an evil king who was granted immortality on condition that he couldn't be killed by man nor beast, neither at day nor at night, nor in the air or on the ground... so Vishnu shows up at dusk in the form of a part-man/part-beast to rip the bastard up in his lap (which is neither in the air nor on the ground).
And here's something of similar interest...
The creature's name is Barong, and here he is again, seen in his usual context, a traditional Balinese dance of the same name...
Again, we're looking at an apparently fierce monster, and though the above picture may make it easy to think that he's fighting the men, the reality is that he's doing a magic dance to save them from the spell of an evil witch.
And here's a picture of the witch...
And here's the exact-same witch, as re-imagined by an Indonesian poet, who suggested that she was the victim of patriarchy...
What's the point?
Perspective.
What may seem like a horrific monster to Western eyes, is in fact a savior to Hindu and/or Balinese eyes. And what may be an evil witch to some, may be a beautiful mother to someone else.
100% of the publishers to whom I submitted A New Friend For Chanda And Chapal agreed that the pictures were beautiful, but 100% of those same publishers rejected it... not because they thought I was peddling monsters (or Babylonian whores) to children, but because they thought it was too complicated a story for a children's picture book.
I couldn't understand their perspective at the time, so, rather than make changes to simplify the picture book, I gave up on it.
It wasn't until after finishing my novel that I discovered self publishing on Amazon, and though I did try to simplify the picture book at that time, I didn't try very hard. But I sent a copy of the book to another Westerner with an interest in Hindu culture.
His name is Stephen Aitken, the male co-author of an award-winning book called The Colour Thief (spelling the word color with a u, because that's how Brits spell it, and since India used to be under British rule, East Indians all learn English the British way).
I asked Stephen for some constructive criticism, and (copied from his original email, exactly as he typed it, with all the errors) his response was:
It's unfortunate that although Stephen mentioned big words, he couldn't take the time to point out which words were big. And that although he wrote not everything has to be described, he again didn't take the time to mention where in the story my descriptions could've been cut.
He was obviously typing fast (on his cellphone) and although I'm sure the message made perfect sense from his learned perspective, it wasn't helpful to me, because, as a novice, I needed more detail... oh, and I should also point out that some publishers like to discourage writers and illustrators from working too closely with each other (or from being one and the same person), because when words and pictures meet, they become art... and I guess working with art isn't something they love to do... because the first priority of any publisher is to turn a profit, and art doesn't do that.
But I'm not really trying to turn a profit with my first three picture books. I wrote them years ago, gave up on them, and only decided to put them online because I hope that someone will enjoy them... and I hope you'll enjoy A New Friend For Chanda And Chapal... big words and all... available now on Amazon.
About My Last Posters…
(May 5th, 2024)
Having moved out of the unbearable living situation in St. Johns, I'd moved into an alternately unbearable situation in a noisy house next door to a noisy Chinese restaurant/bar.
I don't know if that bar ever hosted live shows, but for some reason I'd become interested in a completely different bar that did, The World Famous Kenton Club, where all shows cost a $10.00 cover fee unless otherwise advertised.
I reached out to them via email, expressing an interest in exchanging my skills as an artist/graphic designer for a free meal and/or a few free drinks. And, as usual the booking manager responded affirmatively... but, to my surprise, the first poster he wanted me to make was for a band whose general aesthetic looked nothing like the posters in my portfolio.
The band's name was Stress Position, and if the link I've provided is still active you'll see that they play heavy, dark, post-punk, and their favorite colors are black and white.
Make no mistake, black and white are colors, but I like working with a wider palette, and my first draft of the poster was mostly pink. But I wanted to make the booking manager happy, so, before he even asked, I made a few changes...
I don't think the band approved, because my poster doesn't appear anywhere on their social-media sites... but the booking manager must've liked it, because he immediately asked me to design another poster, for another show, headlining another band, with another aesthetic that was entirely outside my purview...
I thought it turned out well, but again, I guess the bands weren't impressed, because I don't see the poster on any of their social-media sites... but again, the booking manager must've liked it, because he immediately asked me to begin work on a poster for the club's weekend-long celebration of International LGBT + Pride Day...
Again, the booking manager approved, and after thanking me wholeheartedly for my efforts, he assured me that I had a huge credit at the bar, and that I could come in anytime. So I decided to finally collect on my free meal and/or drinks.
I sat at the bar, and asked if the booking manager was in, but the bartender said, "No."
So I asked the bartender if he'd heard of me, and he said, "No."
So I asked if there was any food/drink credit waiting for me, and he said, "No."
So I ordered a meal and a drink (which I paid for), then I whipped out a pencil and paper, and started drawing a mini story about a tattooed unicorn...
One more page... and by the way, this was written before I became aware of the he said/she said parallax...
And that's it... the story was written and illustrated for an old boss, and if you're wondering about the blank space on every page, it's because I was experimenting with a different format. The above pages were actually designed to be a kind of accordion-fold bookmark (printed back to back, with the white space cut out), and although I'm proud of the posters I made for The World Famous Kenton Club, I never set foot in there again, nor have I designed a single poster (for anyone) since. But I had a lot more fun with, and got a lot more fulfillment out of the unicorn story.
About My Third Book…
(May 1st, 2024)
The house next to the noisy bar had its perks, but when my noisy
landlord barged into my noisy room one day while drunk, I quickly moved
into a cockroach-invested motel... and because I really, really didn't like cockroaches, I started writing/illustrating my third book, hoping it's success would afford me the opportunity to move out.
Freckled Kelly: The Koala Who Loves Sunshine And Hugs, is a perfect example of trying to write from the superego's perspective... I don't know if I succeeded, but the effort was genuine in that I really (truly) wrote it to make someone else happy. And if there are any artists and/or other genuinely creative people reading this, I'm sure it'll come as no surprise to them that that someone was a girl.
She was my old boss, and the head chef/co-owner of a gastropub located somewhere in North Portland... Oregon... the worst city in the world.
I'd quit that job months earlier, because my hatred for my old boss's boyfriend made my crush on her unbearable. But I kept thinking about my old boss and a wish she shared with me when, for some reason, we were sharing wishes:
Parts of Australia are out in the woods, and hot, and sunny, and (provided there are no crocodiles around) I'm sure the country has at least one river that'd be ideal for jumping into... while naked... it's also one of those strange and exotic countries that I've always wanted to go to but could never afford to get to, so I thought that if I could get a book published there, I might be able to get the hell out of the hellhole called Portland.
I spent the following summer frantically writing and illustrating. And when I finally printed the book's original draft, I marched back into my old boss's pub and read her the story... and it made her so happy that she cried... but, long story short, she still had a boyfriend, and I still hated him, so I marched right back out and never returned.
My next step was to look for Australian publishers, and after emailing the manuscript to one, I was surprised to get a reply from another:
The unsolicited response was from someone who introduced himself as Andrej Trbojevic, the commissioning publisher for Little Steps Publishing, which, suspiciously, has its offices located in the exact-same suite as New Frontier Publishing (the publisher I actually submitted to).
I had further suspicions when Andrej wrote:
In other words, Andrej wanted me to pay him to publish my book.
I suppose it's a pretty lucrative scam... I mean, I'm sure there are a lot of hopeful artists and/or other genuinely creative people who've produced work that was so important to them that they'd be willing to do or pay just about anything to bring their work to life in the public eye. And I might've even considered Andrej's offer if I'd had the money to pay him with, but (with only one exception) since moving to the godawful, wretched, stinking pit of Portland, I've only ever made minimum wage or just above minimum wage... working in restaurants, convenience stores, and other terrible, thankless, soul-crushing jobs that in a previous century would've been considered indentured servitude.
So, unable to pay-to-play, I found a polite way of telling Andrej to suck my fat one.
Again, it wasn't until years latter, after finishing a novel and facing new publishing challenges that I discovered self publishing on Amazon... I've read Freckled Kelly to a few people since, and though my old boss was the only one of them moved to tears, she wasn't the only one moved to smile.
I smile whenever I look at the book's cover... it's a collage of characters and other original elements from the internal pages, and although I'm sure the koala, frogs, and fish are easily identified by non-Australians, I'm also sure that some people might wonder about this grumpy guy...
He's my version of a bunyip, a cryptid from Aboriginal mythology who's often seen in Australian kids' books and other media. Descriptions of the bunyip are wildly varied, but certain cryptozoologists have theorized that it's a kind of Lazarus taxon (a term for animals thought to be extinct), and the theory I like best is that it's some form of diprotodontidae, or giant, ground-dwelling marsupial... like this...
I drew him with sharp teeth, and colored him like a Tasmanian tiger, and he appears on the cover exactly as seen in the book... but the rainbow in the background was made recently, because it's only been recently that I've spent time contemplating rainbows.
The cover rainbow is obscured behind characters and landscape, so let me show it to you here, without anything in the way...
And now I'll show you the rainbow as it was originally illustrated, inside the book...
Notice the difference?
Theoretically, all rainbows are circular, so although the obvious difference may be that the rest of the circle is below the horizon in the book, you can take it for granted that the full, circular rainbow does in fact exist... but how many colors do you see in one versus the other? And what order are they in?
The original rainbow was drawn with only six colors, because, as an artist, I was used to thinking about rainbows in terms of the traditional color wheel... like this...
But, although colorful, the above wheel isn't meant to depict the colors in a rainbow. It was designed to help artists mix paint... which means it wasn't designed considering this...
This is an illustration showing the colors described by Sir Issac Newton in his famous experiments with light and prisms. According to him, there are seven elemental colors in light: red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, indigo, and violet. They're easy to see in rainbows once you're aware of them, and they always appear in the same order, transitioning from red on the outside to violet on the inside. But what scientists like Newton call rainbows only technically appear in the sky directly opposite of the sun... like this...
And the rainbow on the cover of Freckled Kelly appears around the sun... like this...
I'm not a scientist, so I won't begin to attempt to explain the terminology or physics. But when what I call a rainbow appears around the sun, the order of colors reverse, transitioning from violet on the outside to red on the inside.
Because the sun appears behind the rainbow in my original illustration for Freckled Kelly, I'm sure it's more conceptual than technical... meaning my only intention was to illustrate the happiness of the moment. I could've spent time recoloring/repositioning the rainbow (to make it more technically accurate) before publishing the book on Amazon, but the truth is that I wanted to write about the difference between the two, because rainbows in general became an essential symbol, integral to the plot of my novel as I searched for a way to depict the invisible colors in the ultraviolet and infrared spectra... like this...
But that subject is better reserved for a different blog entry. In the meantime, you can enjoy the rainbows in and on the cover of Freckled Kelly, available now on Amazon.
About My First Novel…
(June 12th, 2024)
Needless to say, Freckled Kelly wasn't going to get me to Australia... but the roaches in my motel were getting on my nerves.
I'd been renting a room in the back of the live-in motel manager's three-bedroom apartment, and when that manager absconded with my rent (and everyone else's), he was replaced by two incomprehensibly-stupid rednecks from somewhere in the inbred part of Southern Washington (state). So when that didn't work out, I moved into a sh*tty little room, in a sh*tty house, in sh*tty Portland's sh*tty Kenton neighborhood... the last neighborhood on the road north before entering the unholy waste of space that is Delta Park.
Neighborhood residents can hear an almost constant noise coming from the nearby racetrack, and when the noise got to be too much for me to bear, I often wanted to drown my sorrows in beer at The World Famous Kenton Club... but since my unwavering dedication to principle made that a non-option, I'd often ride my bike to the area's only other viable attraction, the Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant...
The above image is a bird's-eye view courtesy of Google Maps... I've had a few beers since the last time I was there (roughly four years ago), so my memory is a little hazy, but I can tell you that some of the circular-looking structures are called digesters.
The digesters work a lot like a human stomach... microorganisms decompose organic matter, creating methane in the process, and the plant uses most of that gas to heat the digesters and administration building... excess methane gets burned off at night, resulting in a flame roaring from the top of a towering smokestack that's impressive enough to be seen from several blocks away.
Roughly north of the flame, you can see the Columbia Slough, and spanning the slough, you can see a sh*tty little footbridge connecting the otherwise divided ends of the Columbia Slough Trail... that's where the novel was born... in the center of that bridge, on a moonlit night, when I'd had way too much to drink and not nearly enough to do.
And no, I wasn't on the bridge contemplating suicide... I was just drunk and bored, and I really (really) needed to take a piss.
I was however miserably depressed, so when I finished my piss, I returned to my sh*tty little room, and started writing what I thought would be a short little story that'd cheer me up.
At first, the story was about me (drunk and bored), pissing into a slough from the edge of a bridge. Then I added a few paragraphs about the old boss I had a crush on. Then I added a few more paragraphs intended to fulfill a few fantasies about the old boss. And then, to make those fantasies complete, I added a few more paragraphs intended to take me and my old boss on a fantasy narrative to a little town (called La Tirana) in the Chilean desert, where once a year (very close to my birthday) the little town's population explodes for something called the Fiesta de La Tirana, a celebration of music, costume, and faith... here's a picture (evidently taken by someone named Juan Jaeger) of one of the costumes...
The colorful mask pictured above is one of many diablos (Spanish for devils), essential characters in a traditional dance known as The Diablada (or the Danza de los Diablos). And here's another picture, of another little town (south west of La Tirana), that's been abandoned for decades...
And here's another picture, of something called The Atacama Humanoid (or skeleton), found in the vicinity of the abandoned town's abandoned church...
It looks like an alien. And, whether it is or it isn't, some people believe it is... and I wanted to believe that writing about two cooks on vacation in Chile, drinking beer with Diablada dancers at the Fiesta de La Tirana before visiting an abandoned mining town in the Atacama Desert to look for aliens was a great way to start a novel.
So I spent the next four years moving from one place to another, getting one sh*tty job after another, getting fired, quitting, and not caring about anything else while the COVID pandemic, a defunded police force, and a whole mess of decriminalized methamphetamines somehow managed to turn the city of Portland into an even worse place to live. And what started out as a short little story based on fantasy fulfillment, turned into my own road toward personal enlightenment...
But again, that subject is better reserved for a different blog entry... I've already started it, and will continue to update it while continuing to explore the novel's themes in real life... in the meantime, this blog is finished, and my next step is to start practicing what my novel preaches, by really making an effort to understand the world from alternate perspectives, and really trying to see the world through other people's eyes.
I'll be seeing you... soon (on Wix).