Doodles

The Thing (©2011 Marvel Comics)

Ten minute sketch, ballpoint pen on

appropriately-colored scratch paper.

Fountain of Youth

I just got off the phone with Mom. She called to tell me that our little backwoods hollow in Greene County was swarming with work crews who are widening the road there to allow access for the giant trucks that travel to and from the Bailey Mine and all of the coal-mining, gas-drilling, and other environment-destroying folderol that goes with it. It's the latest in a long string of events that makes it more and more difficult to go home.

I grew up in Union Valley, the middle of nowhere in the northwest corner of Greene County. It's right on the other side of Time (the actual name of a small village you won't find on any current maps, though we old-timers still call it Dogtown). Incredibly rural. My family had 70 to 80 acres of land, mostly woods. We've been in that valley since the 1800's. The adjoining property was 90 acres. Behind my house there was a tract of land we called the CharMar Ranch (named after the original owners, I presume, and I could probably find out pretty easily). This was roughly 3000 acres of farmland, used mostly for cattle. It was covered in woods and meadows and streams. This was essentially my back yard and I grew up like Robin Hood. By the time I was 7 I was allowed to traipse all over this area on my own (much to the chagrin f some other kids parents when they were sure I had gotten everyone lost on my seventh birthday... but that's another story).

Sometime in the 80's this land was bought by Consol and they opened the Bailey Mine. Things began to change immediately. It is a very prosperous mine, and the first thing that needed to happen to tap its resources was train tracks that allowed them to haul the coal out. They built a railroad right through the middle of some of my very favorite places on the planet. Now, luckily, I was away at grad school at the time, so I missed most of the day-to-day work that went into changing the landscape. But every time I came home for a visit more and more of my childhood lay buried under tons of dirt and rock. The lower end of three very specific small hollows had to be filled in order to lay the tracks. Few people who live in the area now could even name the hollows but they're still in my memory: Limestone Hollow, Coal Bank, and The Church Hollow.

I spent time in the woods in all of these, but it was the loss of Church Hollow that pained me the most. The Union Valley Methodist Church stood at the mouth of the hollow, and was, pretty much, in my back yard. This was the church I grew up in. It was built in 1879.

Union Valley Methodist Church circa 1929

I don't know if there is any paperwork to back this up or not, and there certainly isn't anyone left alive to know for sure, but I was told by my grandmother that the land the church stood on was donated by my great grandfather, Lon Wise.

Lon and Maggie Wise

There are so many memories associated with Church Hollow I can't possibly recount them all here. Wading and playing in the small stream that ran through it. Playing with my Johnny West Marx action figures at the rock outcropping that hung over the stream. My Mom stepping on a thorn when I was 5 or 6 and sending me on my own to get help from the neighbor lady, Dora Clutter. Shooting my first (and last) deer there and discovering that in spite of my upbringing I simply wasn't a hunter. Hanging out with friends that one time when we were just old enough to be having different thoughts about the girls with us without really realizing why.

There was one spot, a bare rock face in the hillside where natural spring water oozed out, trickled and then fell onto a flat rock surface. Thousands of years of dripping had formed a natural bowl-shaped depression where the water gathered. Over the fall and winter it would fill with dirt and leaves. Every spring I would clean it out and keep it clear all summer long. It was my job. The water was clean and cold and completely drinkable.

The railroad filled the mouth of Church Hollow, burying the rock outcropping and the small cove where Mom stepped on the thorn. There is a large culvert pipe that passes through the mound of dirt, allowing the stream to run through. It's dark and claustrophobic and just big enough for a person to walk through if you don't mind snakes and getting your feet wet. If you're hardy enough you can also scale the mound, cross the tracks and drop into the upper part of the Hollow. I did this a few times, just to see, though I suppose it was technically trespassing (that's still a hard concept for me to swallow with a place that was always open to me in the past).

The upper part of the hollow, at that time, was pretty much the same as it always had been. On every one of my few trips I cleaned out the natural water bowl and drank.

I haven't been back in over a decade. I'm told that the hollow is now filled with the run-off and unusable materials that have been pulled out of the ground; slate and shale and dirt. I don't want to see it. It would probably kill me to drink the water now. Most of the natural wells that people have used there for decades have been spoiled. The actual shape of the hillside and the horizon has been changed as piles of waste material have been stacked and shaped as coal continues to pour out of the earth. Now, they have started drilling for natural gas.

This isn't entirely new. Most of the eastern half of Greene County has been mined for decades. My grandfather (maternal, this time) made his living tending natural gas wells near our home. I don't want this to turn into an environmental or political rant. There's a ton of that out there if you're interested in the details. It brings money into the county, but destroys the community and the environment. It creates jobs at the expense of history. I'm simply not well-informed enough to debate the issue in any way other than my own emotional response to it.

Consol is buying out every home and farm they can. People who have lived there for years are making more money off their property than they ever dreamed of, at least it seems that way until the reality of moving and buying something else sets in. I have cousins who are heartbroken. They planned on spending their lives on the tracts of land their parents and grandparents lived on. It was a dream that they never really questioned. Now the future they envisioned is gone, and once they leave, the very land that holds their memories will be changed as well.

I realized a long time ago I would never live there again. As much as I love my childhood home my current life is elsewhere. For whatever reasons that area simply doesn't offer what I need out of life. That's not a judgement on those who have stayed behind, just a recognition of my own truth. I will miss the opportunity to “go home” and walk the land that holds my family's history, but I'm not losing the same things they are.

And I see this as a natural progression that has happened before. We weren't the first people to live in the Valley. On the Clutter farm next door there was one garden on a hill that, every time it was plowed, would turn up handfuls of arrowheads. There are maybe a dozen people left who know or remember this. The arrowheads were all that was left of other peoples lives and histories there. No one knows their stories at all, and I'm sure they spent more generations there than my family has.

So the wheel turns and history moves inexorably forward. Real life becomes memory and memory becomes story.

Keep telling your stories.

Magic Theater. For Madmen Only.

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.” Hermann Hesse

I first read Hermann Hesse the year I turned 25. I was in grad school at the time and in the middle of exploring literature and the great writers and his name was on the list. At the time I'm pretty sure that his book Steppenwolf (yes, it's where the band and the Jack Kirby character got their name), was the only work of his I had heard of. If memory serves I found a used paperback copy of it one day while shopping for comics at Books Galore in Erie. I had no idea that this was going to be one of the seminal books of my life.

I read somewhere that later in his life Hesse expressed surprise that Steppenwolf had found an audience among young people. He had written it when he himself was nearing 50, and the protagonist of the novel, Harry Haller, is the same age. Hesse believed he was addressing the concerns on middle age, yet the book's primary popularity was among the college-age reader.

All I know is at the time Steppenwolf seemed to speak to everything I was going through in my life. I remember thinking that here was an author who had found the words to my soul and he had done it years before I had been born. Yes, I know how young and overly dramatic and poetic that may sound. But, one of the things I love about Hesse's writing is that throughout his life his voice remained young and overly dramatic and poetic. He was unburdened by the post-modern, morbidly self-aware fear of seeming sentimental (since when should genuine sentiment be considered a bad thing?).

It's difficult to remember just what it was that struck me so strongly. I certainly wasn't a depressed middle-age man who was contemplating suicide. I wasn't old enough to feel like I had missed out on life. But there was something.

Part of it was the duality of personality he talked about (and this isn't a book review, so I'm not going into the plot here... read it). I have always struggled to balance the extroverted and introverted parts of myself. I was yearning for the life of the artist, the life of the soul, and at times feeling bogged down with the reality of this world. It is the tension between the sacred and the profane that is at the heart of the novel. I still feel that at times, though not as profoundly as Harry Haller. I think any creative person in a life-long relationship with their muse feels this.

This started me on a Hesse kick and I read pretty much everything by him I could get my hands on. My bookshelves still hold a large Hesse collection, including a first edition of a poetry collection called Hours In The Garden, a birthday gift from A_. I devoured his work. Though I read them out of order I was able to see the progression of his thought and the development of the themes that ran throughout. His way of looking at the world informed my own and I spent a lot of time trying to write like him before I realized I needed to find my own voice.

The year I turned 40 I reread Steppenwolf and once again it seemed to speak to everything I was going through in my life. How could that be? I was fifteen years older, no longer a callow youth, and certainly still not a depressed, suicidal middle-age man. That was the year I signed the contract to have my first novel published, so I was at least on my way to finding my own voice (and my novel really doesn't resemble a Hesse novel at all). I resolved then to put it back on the shelf and read again the year I turned 50.

I just finished rereading it. For the first time I came to this book at the age of the protagonist. I also came to it with a different perspective than either of the last two times. I had expectations this time. Did it speak to everything going on in my life? Yes, but not in the same way. I read it this time looking for the ways it would resonate. More than speaking to me now I was aware of how many of the ideas have simply become a part of my life. Thanks to Harry Haller's struggles I didn't have to go through the same thing. Though inarguably middle-aged, I'm still not a depressed, suicidal man who feels like he has missed out on life.

Steppenwolf served as a cautionary tale. I learned early not miss opportunities that arose. Unlike Haller I learned to dance, and to enjoy music and the joys of the sensual world. The sacred and the profane both exist, hand in hand, and they are both a part of my life and each would probably be unrecognizable without the other.

There were certainly still lessons to be learned. I was more aware of Hesse's political commentary this time around, and how it reflected my own current thoughts on the topic. It's a subject I can get easily mired in, much to my emotional detriment. There are ideas in the novel I need to think through to help me be more at peace with these issues.

Let me quote a passage from early in the novel...

“Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.”

This was certainly true of the world when Hesse wrote it. He says in the novel that Nietzsche suffered what everyone was suffering, only a generation earlier. This was written in the early days of radio, and worldwide communication was just starting to be taken for granted. We now live in a time when not only two ages, cultures and religions overlap, but when all cultures and religions overlap in ways they never have before. In the Information Age time has sped up. Changes in technology have both united the world and separated us in unprecedented ways. Does this, in Hesse's words, reduce us to real suffering, to hell? Does the world suffer more now than ever before, or are we simply more informed about it? Are there more Harry Hallers out there now, living the famed life of quiet desperation than ever before? I don't know. If so, there are lessons in Hesse that can help.

I am still enamored of Hesse, and amazed that I can still find gold in his work. This is alchemy as it's meant to be understood. It's the transformation of lead (base material, the profane) into gold (spiritual material, the sacred).

Maybe I'll read it again when I turn 75.

Flying With Broken Wings

I've been a music fan most of my life, and came of age in the early and mid-70's. But even with music as another major hobby in my life I'm pretty sure my fondness for comics had an influence on my early musical choices. Nothing else really explains my attraction to bands and performers in costume. Alice Cooper was the first act I ever really got into. I was just young enough to have missed the real Glam Rock scene, so even though I had a couple of David Bowie singles he was well into his Berlin period and past the Sci Fi Ziggy Stardust era I no doubt would have been crazy about. I loved Elton's costumes and I know for a fact that I bought my first KISS album, Destroyer, without knowing anything about what they sounded like, simply because they looked like superheroes on the cover.

These bands are all considered legendary now, but for the most part, back home in my rural surroundings, I was the only person I knew who dug Queen more than Bachman Turner Overdrive.

This blog isn't meant to recount all of my music anecdotes. I'll probably come back to some of those as time goes on. This serves primarily as an introduction to the topic of my musical tastes, and the fact that I got made fun of for a lot of them back then (even for Alice and KISS).

I think the costumes and the shows were off-putting to a lot of my peers. I realize now that even more off-putting was the androgyny and sexual ambiguity of Glam Rock. Now, this was the 70's and while I now know the topics of homosexuality and gender-bending politics were a big part of this scene (as well as the Disco scene of the era), these weren't topics that anyone was very comfortable talking about back home in rural Greene County. I thought Freddie Mercury's flamboyance made him a great performer, and honest-to-god the idea that he was gay really never crossed my mind. I'm going on record here to say that at that age, and at that time, it simply didn't occur to me. I don't know if that's more of a testament to how things have changed since then or to my naivety.

But there was one band that, while I liked their music, made me a little uncomfortable.

I read about Angel in some rock magazine. The rumor in that mag was that Angel was actually the members of KISS, out of makeup, playing in this band as a side-project. They were the light counterpart, sort of a Yin Yang image, of KISS. That was untrue of course, and it was obvious for a number of reasons. Even with their makeup on the shape of the faces were completely wrong. But as a KISS fan it got my attention. If they sounded anything like KISS I wanted to hear it.

They were discovered (At least as I remember the story without doing a lot of research), playing in a Washington, DC club by Gene Simmons of KISS. They wore all white and had developed an elaborate stage show. They were signed by Casablanca records and put on the fast track to Arena Rock success. That didn't quite work out. Here's their band logo...

Okay, now turn your computer screen upside down and look at it again. Pretty cool, hunh?

So I bought their album White Hot. They didn't sound anything like KISS, but I liked it. But this is where we get to the uncomfortable part. This was the cover...

Pretty Gay, isn't it? You should see the band pictures on the inside. These guys were pretty.

I've never really wrestled with those issues. I've pretty much always liked girls. I have however been targeted for a lot of teasing and misunderstanding by other people for those issues. That's the danger of growing up as an emotionally open and sensitive man with an artistic temperament. To be fair, I listened to a lot of bands with men in makeup and tight costumes and my primary hobby was comics, which featured mostly muscular men in tights, so I can understand where the assumptions came from. When I was younger this bothered me. Now, as an adult who is comfortable with his sexuality (and with anyone else's, just for the record), I don't really care.

But Angel was just a step beyond, and I think it hurt their success. They toured the arenas, released several albums (including a live one), but never really caught on the way Casablanca hoped they would. I think there were a lot of reasons for this. They appeared a little late to really cash in on the androgyny of the Glam Rock fad, and that never caught on in America the way it did in England. We're a little more homophobic as a society, I believe (and yes, I know that's debatable, and not what this post is about). They used keyboards, which made their sound a little too Prog Rock for the hard rock fans. They were a little too hard rock for the Prog fans. Rock is the Devil's music and these guys were dressing in pure white. They weren't dangerous. A decade later the airwaves were filled with hairbands who overcame the androgyny of makeup and flamboyant costumes with a bad boy attitude. But Angel was... pretty.

They broke up, and were for the most part forgotten. Somewhere along the line I lost the White Hot album. I'm fairly sure it got mixed up with a college roommate's massive vinyl collection. I'm not accusing him of anything, but Steve, if there's a copy of this in your house it's probably mine (you can keep it... I replaced it on CD a few years back).

Last winter I played White Hot for the first time in awhile. I've had the CD for a few years and had enjoyed the nostalgia factor, but for some reason this time it really clicked again. I did some digging and got the rest of their discography and have been really into it again. It's absolutely filled to the brim with over-produced pomposity and Glam Rock majesty. It's silly and over-the-top and it rocks. You can hear a lot of tracks on YouTube, but this is one of the few actual live clips I found.

Yeah, this is one of the reasons I was made fun of, but you have to love any band that uses the word "halcyon" in a song lyric.

Doodles

As you may have surmised from reading these I draw. Most of what people have seen from me has been finished work. I do a lot of rough sketches on various pieces of scrap paper. The entirety of Grey Legacy Tales was pencilled on scrap paper where I worked out the composition without the pressure of it being perfect on the final bristol. I would then lightbox what I needed onto the bristol paper and move straight to the inking stage (my favorite part). Few people ever saw the roughs. Recently, thanks to Nick Marino over at Audioshocker (among other places) I've been more comfortable showing the rough stuff. I've always liked seeing this sort of thing from other artists. You can get a lot of insight into process by looking at the early stages of something. So, I'm going to start posting some of my roughs here. A lot of these will probably never actually get turned into "finished" drawings.

This is a quick sketch of Brix. I like the expression on her face a lot. I've drawn and sketched her a lot in the last couple of years, so I've become pretty comfortable with her. This was a ball point pen on a piece of scratch paper.

If you've read my first Novel, King of Summer (or heard my one public short story reading at Encyclopedia Destructica), you've been introduced to the character of Wren. She appeared in a short comics story (you can read it at Drunk Duck), drawn by Fred Wheaton. I gave him free rein to design her based on my written description. I like what he did. Part of the joy of the written word is that everyone gets to see characters in their own way. This is how I see Wren at about age 20, the way she appears in a novel I've written called This Creature Fair (more on that in the next few weeks). You don't have to see her this way.

Brix Strip #9

My final Brix Strip for the Chatham Communique for the year. I hope to get ahead of next year's schedule over the summer.

Old Lloyd Cole Article

Time to reprint another of my old articles from Pulp Newsweekly. I wrote the following review for singer/songwriter Lloyd Cole's album "Music in a Foreign Language" in 2003. Lloyd is a long-time favorite, and intrinsically tied into some very specific memories for me. I really can't be objective about this artist. Lloyd Cole Music In A Foreign Language, the latest CD by singer/songwriter Lloyd Cole, marks the twenty-year anniversary of his recording career. Rattlesnakes, his first album with his band the Commotions, was released in the post New Wave, pre-Alternative days of 1984, spawning the minor radio hit Perfect Skin. What separated Cole from most of his contemporaries were his well-written, literate lyrics. He was able to combine intelligence and emotion in clever turns of phrase. His voice was plaintive, emotional and sexy, angst-ridden without being whiney. It was the perfect combination to appeal to what was then called College Rock. In spite of this strong start, wider success continued to elude him. Still, true to his muse, Cole continued to work and record. In 1990, after three albums, he dropped the Commotions with his eponomously titled Lloyd Cole. The 90’s saw him experiment with different sounds. Both Bad Vibes and Don’t Get Weird On Me Babe featured richer sounds with full orchestration. His last major label release in the US, The Negatives (with Jill Sobule), featured the return of a more traditional band structure. Since then Cole has continued to record without the support of the music industry. He sold albums directly from his website, maintaining a close personal contact with his fan base. Music In A Foreign Language was originally released in Europe in 2003 on Sanctuary Records. In 2004 an American label, One Little Indian Us, picked it up. For the first time in years Cole is getting airplay. The sound is stripped down, focusing primarily on Cole’s voice and guitar. The other instrumentation serves to underscore these strengths. His lyrics are still literate and intelligent, laced with melancholy and yearning. His cover of Nick Cave’s People Ain’t No Good is delivered as a simple statement of sad-but-true, obvious fact. “I learned the language of the self-obsessed,” he sings in Shelf Life, the album’s final track. His voice is older now, more experienced, accepting of life instead of resigned to it. The last lines of the album seem to reflect that more mature attitude. “No longer waiting for my prayers to be answered/No longer waiting for my publisher’s call/No longer charming in my reminisces/Only immersed in a faint afterglow.” The following video is a live clip of his first single, "Perfect Skin" from 1984 with his band The Commotions.