Brooks Brothers Anarchist

Pranks, hoaxes, fraud, and forgery. I've always loved pranks and hoaxes, and while I certainly don't condone fraud and forgery, I'd be lying if I said I didn't find those subjects fascinating. Mad Magazine and The Great Brain gave me a taste for that sort of thing as a child, but I didn't fully realize all the anarchic, comedic possibilities of a well done hoax until I was in junior high school.

After a long, boring (in the coma inducing sense of the word) day at school, I'd hang out with my friend Sigurd Jarlson in his parents rec room. Usually we would watch cartoons or read comic books, but one day Will discovered his father's old comedy albums. Cheech and Chong found their way on to the turntable, as did McLean & McLean, the Canadian knockoff of the aforementioned, mostly American duo.

As much as I enjoyed both acts, there was another, and as far as I know, unheard of gem in Mr. Jarlson's collection. It was a cassette tape, and on it, hastily scrawled with a black sharpie, someone had written: Id's Shit. I don't know who was responsible for it, but it was hysterically shocking, and even funnier was the back story that went with the recording. The person or persons responsible for the recording had mailed copies of it to disc jockeys all across the United States, and then sat back and laughed as as competing radio stations sued each other over who owned the rights to the recording.

That, in my eyes, then and now, was brilliant. Raising hell just for the sake of it. Sticking it to the man. For years I labored under the assumption that the man was older, white, wore a three piece suit, aviator frames, voted Republican, went to Church every Sunday, and held the kind of opinions associated with that kind of person. Liberals, well, liberals were, or should have been, a lot like my wife or Seth McFarlane: funny, smart, sophistacted, handsome and or beautiful, well-read, and for the most part moderate, but having an admirable sympathy for the underdog and or downtrodden.

P.J. O'Rourke, and later, of all people, Tommy Chong, challenged my assumptions about who the good guys and the bad guys are. "Ship of Fools", an essay about O'Rourke's trip down the Volga river with a ragtag bunch of aging American leftists, demolished my hitherto unassailable belief that all liberals were like my wife or Seth McFarlane: funny, smart, sophistacted, handsome and or beautiful, well-read, and for the most part moderate, but having an admirable sympathy for the underdog and or downtrodden.

But it was Chong's appearance on a local television chat show that was the real intellectual dynamite. Bearded, but wearing a slick Armani suit; a guy who made a fortune selling comedy albums to stoners, but who collected vintage modernist paintings. The talk-show host was appalled and enraged by both his success and his non-chalance about how he achieved it. It was funny. More hell-raising for the sake of hell-raising, but something was off-kilter about the interview, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

It took awhile for it to sink in, but then it hit me: the talk-show host held all the correct and liberal attitudes Canadians are supposed to have on a variety of issues. Nobody has any serious disagreement with the consensus on peacekeeping, multiculturalism, or single payer healthcare.

However, the woman's mindset was fundamentally conservative. If she agreed with any of the Canadian shibboleths mentioned above, it was because she didn't like change, rather then whether or not any of these things were actually good or useful. Being a liberal, a conservative, a skeptic, or a believer is a state of mind or an approach to looking at the world, not a set of opinions about any given topic.

If James O'Keefe doesn't consciously understand this principle, I think he grasps it on an intuitive level. The nice nihilist in me enjoyed O'Keefe's recent video sting. So welcome to the club, Mr. O'Keefe: it's pretty exclusive, as very few people are like my wife, Seth McFarlane, Tommy Chong, and P.J. O'Rourke: genuinely funny, smart, sophistacted, handsome and or beautiful, well-read, and for the most part moderate, but having an admirable sympathy for the underdog and or downtrodden.

However, if you want to keep your membership and avoid becoming just another right-wing Michael Moore clone, I hope you realize that an anarchist can be quite comfortable in a Brooks Brothers suit, and still piss off the establishment, regardless of which petty troll is pulling the levers of the machinery.

Just ask Tommy Chong if you don't believe me.

The Apple & The Turtle

Computers were, initially, a crushing disappointment. When our sixth grade teacher announced that I was one of the special few that had been chosen for the computer class, I was excited. The machines certainly looked better than what I’d seen on Star Trek. A monitor and keyboard encased in beige plastic certainly looked more futuristic than the big boxes with blinking lights that dotted the pop culture landscape.

But using those Apple II computers turned out to be nothing like what I’d seen on The Jetsons. The first couple of times that I made the little green triangle move across the screen were fun, but pushing it across the screen got progressively less and less interesting the more our little class of brainiacs did it.

And when our teacher tried to get the little robot to move in tandem with the “Turtle” on the screen, the results were…underwhelming. Our teacher spent most of the class racing back and forth between his computer and the twitching, humming, slow moving robot on the floor. Real-life computers and robots weren’t half as glamorous, or smart, as the ones I’d see on Astroboy after school.

When I found out that my friend (who had been deemed less intelligent) had spent an agreeable morning drawing and painting in an extended art class, I asked if I could drop out. However, quitting was not an option, according to my teacher. I was intelligent, resources were limited, and I should be more grateful for the opportunities presented to me.

Suitably chastened, I resumed spending most of computer class watching the teacher try to make the robot work its magic on the floor. Since then, I’ve taught my share of classes and I realize that Steve Jobs wasn’t the person responsible for the dull class. The blame for that can be placed entirely on the shoulders of our teacher, who probably hadn’t done adequate lesson planning.

All was not lost. The public sector of The People’s Republic of Saskatoba might have dropped the ball when it came to preparing me for a fun-filled future full of flying cars, holo decks, and replicants, but the private sector, in the form of my Dad, helped revive my flagging interest a few months later when he purchased, or started buying, the components of a Commodore 64.

Our family was one of limited means, so the purchase was made piecemeal. The keyboard was the first piece that we had. I hooked it up to the black and white television, and to my delight, discovered that I could make pictures with the keyboard. I started building little forts, tanks, cannons, and aircraft, and set about demolishing them using the delete and cursor keys.

It was certainly a lot more fun than watching the turtle move ever so slowly across the screen. And once I we got the disk drive…oh, the wonderful mayhem I could unleash on the screen. Mom might have flipped out when she saw the X-Men cover where Storm was getting ready to stab some hapless evil mutant with a dagger, but I could strike down as many foes as I wanted to with a digital katana and I wouldn’t hear so much as a single objection from my mom.

Was really I learning anything about computers, though? I suppose, at the very least, that Commodore 64 taught me that computers wouldn’t bite. At best, Dad grasped on an intuitive level (and I learned from his example) that a desktop or a laptop represents better all-around value for money than a gaming platform.

As for that friend of mine whose intelligence was deemed insufficient enough to handle the challenges of computer class?

He is currently teaching high school chemistry.

Huck Finn

Canoes are awful. I have fond memories of driving to and from fishing trips, but the actual fishing trips themselves...not so much. Out on the water I remember periods of blissful calm that were punctuated by frenzied moments of pure terror whenever we had the grave misfortune to catch a fish.

Dad, all six feet, two inches, and 220 pounds of him, would leap quite literally into action running and jumping up and down the length of our canoe, to grab the net and get the fish into the boat. He did all this while yelling, "Don't move! Don't move! You'll tip the boat".

I was, of course, petrified with fright, and clutched the gunwales of our little craft in abject horror at the thought of of being the one responsible for sinking our little ship. In hindsight, the only person who was going to drown us was the maniac I referred affectionately to as "Dad".

Rafts, and not canoes, as far as I was concerned at the time, were the only way to travel on a lake or river. Grandma Guppy had given me a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a gift, and I loved the adventures that Huck and Jim had on the mighty Mississippi. Gliding up and down the river using a pole sounded like heaven.

I finally got a chance to find out for myself what riding a raft would have been like. My sweetie pie and I went white water rafting in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania this afternoon. Our raft was made of rigid rubber, and we used paddles, but sustantively, it couldn't have been all that different from what Huck and Jim experienced: fast,bumpy, occasionally scary, and fun.

Fun for me, but I'm typing this at a bed and breakfast after a nice hot meal. Not so fun for Huck and Jim, travelling on that raft for days. I'm surprised they didn't commit suicide early in the novel - life on the raft would have been bumpy, damp, and miserable.

So a raft wouldn't have been quite the pimped out ride my eight year old imagination thought it would be. I'm just glad I've never had to paddle a canoe in my life. My Dad might have been a man of limited means, but he was also one of the most clever men I have ever known (or will know). Our canoe was sixteen feet long, made out of aluminum, and manufactured by Grumann. Dad was able to mount an outboard motor on the back of our craft.

Huck and Jim would have eaten our wake if we ever zipped by them on the Mississippi.

After the Hal Sparks Show at the Arlington Cinema N Drafthouse

Me: Cool! Hal Sparks is a non-drinker just like me.

Sweetie: That's right. Penn Jillette, Hal Sparks and you could have a party. A party with no drinking or smoking. A very boring party with just the three of you.

4 Colors

Browsing through the shelves of comic books at Tramp's Records and Books was an eye opener. I was all of thirteen, and comic books were becoming works of art. Companies had just started printing some comic books on fancy paper. At first blush, it was a counter-intuitive gesture. Funny books were for kids. What was the point of printing them on expensive paper?

It was clearly a move to price impressionable adolescents like myself out of the market. I loved looking at all those comic books printed on glossy paper. Frequently, they had naked people in them, or the writer would drop the f-bomb.

However, there was no way I could buy a comic book like that and bring it home. Some friends of mine had unwittingly discovered a means to hide comic books from their parents: their collection was so huge, there was no way their parents would stumble upon the "adult" graphic novels buried underneath the pile of tamer fare.

Unfortunately, I didn't have their purchasing power, so I had to confine my appreciation to the store shelves or leafing through the stuff my friends had hidden within plain sight in their homes. There was another reason for the expensive paper. If I opened up a book like Blood: A Tale with artwork by Kent Williams, that slick paper made perfect sense. Watercolors wouldn't look so good on newsprint:



Over the years, comic book companies started to print everything on slick, glossy, and very expensive stock. My interest in comic books started to wane as they got more expensive. I'd initially chalked up my dislike of the pricier paper to a misplaced sense of latent artistic elitism.

But paging through the copy of Blood: A Tale that I bought for Lisa made me realize that my distaste for the more glossy offset or stiffly starched baxter paper had nothing to do with cultural conservatism. Ninety percent of the time, better paper doesn't do anything for the artwork.

Take any panel, or page from Sin City by Frank Miller, and it's going to look just as good on newsprint or fancy paper. It's all ink, and done in very simple and bold lines:



Nothing is lost if it gets printed on newsprint, and nothing of value is added to the artwork. But it doesn't have to be simple. Dave Sim and Gerhard brought an almost Baroque level of complexity to the artwork for Cerebus the Aardvark, but the art never suffered because it was printed on cheap paper:



Slick paper is here to stay, at least until Jeff Bezos can figure out a way to make comic books readable on the Kindle. As for myself, I'm just glad I have the purchasing power to buy whatever I want, and more importantly, have a wife who enjoys reading comic books as much as I do.

N.B.: If the Cerebus artwork doesn't look so good, believe me, it's a blog--not a newsprint--issue.

Fett's El Camino

The Millenium Falcon is really a van. A van with a wizard airbrushed on the side. There are hot babes wearing chainmail bikinis clutching the wizard’s knees. And I don’t care what the song says. Fett’s ride would have been an El Camino. With flames painted on the side. And the car’s horn would play “La Chucharacha” every time he hit it. ‘Cause that’s how the Fett Man would have rolled, baby.

While Boba Fett’s earthbound ride would have been pretty pimpin', when I think about it, his actual choice of spaceship was kind of…retarded. I’ve been working on a model of the Slave I, and if the model and movies are correct, the ship takes off and lands horizontally, but flies vertically.

Think about it. The most deadly, dangerous, bounty hunter in the galaxy lies prone on his back staring up at the sky for a few minutes every time his ship lands or takes off. This would give any enemies a perfect window of opportunity to blow him to kingdom come while he struggles to get into or out of his seat.

I’m definitely not the first person to have noticed this flaw, as the good people at Lucasfilm have come up with a half-assed explanation of sorts. If the manufacturer was clever enough to build a spaceship, surely they would have been smart enough to recognize this design flaw in the first place?

Painting the Slave I and the Boba Fett figurine has been labor intensive, but fun. Since nobody is going to see much of the interior anyway, I’m trying to use as many different shades of gray as possible, even though the instructions want me to spray paint pretty much everything one shade of gray, with little touches of black thrown in.

Working with spray paint is a lot of fun. It’s a shame that law abiding, suburban youth--not unlike my considerably younger self--aren’t introduced to this wonderful medium. I spent countless hours in class, filling up loose leaf and defacing binders and textbooks with silly doodles when a much more worthwhile art project was literally parked right under my ass.

I had, in grade seven, a very cool ride: a chopper bicycle. Or rather, it would have been cool if it had been the late seventies. It was the late eighties, and everybody had a BMX. I, on the other hand, was pulling into the school bike rack perched on a banana seat, and getting teased mercilessly for it.

It was a shame I wasn’t a little more confident at the time. That bike had everything: mud guards, high-rise handlebars, and a sissy bar on the back. I’ve long since forgotten, and don’t really care about the taunts. The one thing I do regret is not pushing the envelope with that bike.



The paint had begun to fade, and repainting the bike might have taught me a useful skill. Even if I botched the job, spray painting the bike in a bright, day-glo color would have been fun, and the visual equivalent of a large, upraised middle finger to any classmate who thought my bike looked lame.

I’d like to think that’s what the Fett Man would have done, if he were in junior high school.

Update, Extreme Geeking Edition

For all you Sealab 2021 fans out there, Rocky sent me this message and a link: Hesh = M.C. Chris

Me Am So Smart

Every single time I've used watercolor pencils with a fountain pen, I've smeared ink all over the place and wrecked the drawing I was working on. I couldn't figure out how Graham Roumieu, the author of In Me Own Words, Me Write Book, Bigfoot: I Not Dead did his water color renderings of Bigfoot without smearing the ink.

I was doing a sketch of one of his Bigfoot illustrations, and looking closely at the watercolors, it hit me: he did the watercolor first, AND THEN he drew over it in ink.

I tried it. And whaddya know. It does work!

Or, after seeing this video, maybe I need to go back to the drawing board...



Update: An anonymous commenter was kind enough to point me in the direction of ink that won't smear when used with watercolors.