Merry Christmas Trolleycar Joe...

I'm sketching at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in town, where there are lots of windows to let in the good light and keep me away from the smokers outside. Today, it feels like the Christmas season is upon us, with everyone wrapping up and drinking hot chocolate, peppermint flavored coffee and egg-nog lattes. Outside, Trolleycar Joe is getting harassed by the local cops again.

It's a regular occurrence to see Joe's trolleycar bus parked in a side street somewhere in Uptown. You can't miss it; it's conspicuous as hell. The cops come to shake him down...they know he sleeps in there with his young son after they lost their house several years ago. They know, too, that Trolleycar Joe has a lot of seedy friends among the homeless and the young street punks, and that he helps them out whenever he can. I've never seen him turn away someone who is hungry or in need of a dollar. The cops threaten him with a ticket and then leave, knowing that Joe and his friends have their 3 hour parking window timed out to the second.

Today, Joe is getting a haircut with friends. A young couple is outside the trolley, and the young lady is giving him a haircut and a shave. His straw hat rests on his lap as she lathers up his gruff beard. Her partner is also working on another seemingly homeless man on the folding chair next to his. There are three other older men waiting behind them, sitting on the low concrete wall, and they are chatting in the shade of the overhanging trees. People drive by and wave to old Joe and they honk. Some stop their cars and drop off baskets of canned goods...this time of year, they drop off extra blankets because the trolley is drafty and cold in the winter nights.

People are always giving Joe things...maybe it's all the good karma he's built up over the years. A ragged man offers a cup of brewed coffee to Joe, a refill perhaps, and then he walks into the trolley and I don't see him come out for quite some time. Even a couple of hours of unmolested sleep is a needed respite to someone sleeping on the cold streets. The woman finishes the shave, and gives a dab of hair oil to Joe's freshly clipped hair...he is still a handsome old man and you can see that he likes the attention and that he enjoys looking his dapper best.

Just before the hair cutters arrived, I pulled my car into my spot at the coffee house and took out a plate of Italian cookies my Italian mother baked that week. There were a variety of biscottis and traditional Christmas cookies that I knew Joe would appreciate because his parents were Italian immigrants as well. Every year I do this, and every year Joe gets teary-eyed and thanks me with a smile. But as soon as I give him the basket and he gives he a gentle warm thank-you, he immediately takes off the plastic wrap and offers the cookies to his son, his son's friends, and all the homeless that have gathered around. He samples just one of each and lets everyone else enjoy the bounty. I don't know whether to get angry or to laugh. "It's just Joe being Joe," I think to myself . Maybe that's his secret to his karmic good will, to give everything away and it returns back tenfold in friendships and in good deeds.

I'm sketching as the last of the old men are trimmed. The young lady and man take their portable plastic basins, dump the lathery water into the sewers, pack up their scissors and their folding chairs and cram them into their little hatchback. No money exchanges hands, only hugs and thank-yous are expressed and hats are tipped in appreciation. That's the magic of Joe. His son speeds toward the men and he jumps off his bike in a hurry and the men store the bike on a rack at the front of the trolley, locking it down in seconds as if this move has been practiced many times before. His son jumps into the driver's seat and beckons his father inside. Ever the showman, Joe takes off his hat as he waves from the double swinging passenger side door just before the cop cruisers slowly patrol the street.

Joe moves on to find a safer side street for another couple of hours. He'll be back, though.

It's Christmas time and the homeless guys emerge at the table near the window to where I'm sketching and they show off their new slick cuts to each other. One breaks out a cigarette and another emerges with a fresh, hot refill of drip coffee and shares them by pouring them into tiny taster cups that are free at the counter.

Life is good when Joe is around and the karma is flowing. I even get quite a bit of sketching done today and the hot chocolate hits the spot.

Isolation and the Lonely Life of Henry Darger...

I admit that I was curious about the film, "In the Realms of the Unreal," through the papers that praised Henry Darger as an outsider artist and troubled recluse. But I felt uneasy about going to the theatre and watching a limited release film that featured a grown man obsessed with drawing and painting pictures of little girls with tiny penises. It just seemed odd and perverse.

But catching the film on YouTube, I became fascinated by the lonely life of this sad, little man and how his obsession with his illustrated novel became the focal point of his entire life.

It really hit home when I began arranging my sketchbook pages into Mylar sheets and I started ordering and numbering the pages to scan into my website...I had a lot of pages. There were many that were too primitive and badly drawn that I scrapped, and there were the full page ones, the spot illustration pages, the inked pages...things that had characters I would pull out for future reference. There was a lot my brain was tinkering with. I began to feel that I have led an isolated, solitary life and that these pages were the legacy of that isolation.

I began thinking of poor Henry Darger, alone and abandoned at an early age, returning to his shabby little apartment after a day of scrubbing floors at his job as a janitor, returning to his one solace: writing and illustrating a book where he was leader of the Gemini Squadron, protector of the innocence of children, enslaved by evil forces in an unjust, un-Christian realm. He spent his entire lifetime writing over 15,000 pages of this novel, complete with hundreds of full color and black-and white illustrations done with a self-taught, naive hand.

That is a body of work. It is painful to watch the film and listen to narrator read the words that are gibberish and overwrought with the emotion of a novice writer. It is painful, too, to look at the pages and pages of missteps it took to achieve his finished art pieces. All those years, alone and searching to perfect his vision of his perfect and divine fantasy world, where all children were free and allowed full expression in a corrupt, deceitful adult world.

I think, somehow, that this is the steady decline towards a sweeping madness. This type of obsession starts little by little, becoming a daily preoccupation, and then a necessity, and then it merges into compulsion. This seems the way that the cat fancier slowly drifts into multiple cats and then finally to "crazy cat lady"...loneliness and compulsive need take over. This is probably the digression into most pack-rat behavior.

But, still, I can't help but feel that when Henry Darger died and his landlords finally entered his apartment and found thousands upon thousands of pictures, most beautiful, some disturbing, that they were like the first archaeologists unearthing King Tut's tomb. Such a visual treasure of papers and art and books and art supplies scattered in his tiny studio space. Here was a man who spent his entire life obsessively writing and drawing the visions in his head and no one saw his work or heard him speak of it at all, like the proverbial fallen tree in the woods. And now his apartment is a shrine to this lonely venture, his art depicted in books of outsider art and visionary thinkers.

I look at my collection of hundreds and hundreds of pages under Mylar protectors, and there are still more to shake loose from my brain, and I wonder if the isolation and the seclusion is really worth it all.

Here's the link to the first installment on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PMBVxJnoPw

Living Vicariously Through the Tattooed...

Sometimes I wonder why it is I like drawing characters with tattoos. I'm not a flamboyant person; I'm not one to stand out in a crowd or even to crave outward attention by passing strangers. Even when I'm sketching out in the open and a curious person comes over to my table to look at my work, I find myself growing increasing shy and inwardly quiet.

One thing is for sure is that drawing tattoos, especially multiple tattoos on a character, is a good design choice, because it draws the eye into specific tiny details and immediately identifies the character. I think it is the one thing I fear in getting a tattoo inked on my own body...that gnawing fear of being sidled with a single, specific symbol of my being for the rest of my life. No one exact symbol could define me because I'm constantly reading and living and absorbing different concepts that shape me. It would mean that I would have to accommodate a new symbol each time my world view shifted, and that would mean inking major portions of my flesh.

Still, I envy those that can commit to a specific identifiable symbol that empowers them or allows others to become attracted to their inner natures. There is that instantaneous hook that draws people closer, makes them curious enough to go up to someone with an interesting tattoo and begin conversing on the style, the content, the tattoo artist who inked them. And while I get a vicarious kick at looking at a nicely designed tattoo, I like that there is a story behind the art, that there exists a personal mythology, an enigma that can only be shared through a deeper intimacy.

A friend once told me that he buys a pack of cigarettes to keep inside his shirt even though he doesn't smoke. He gives them out to people when he knows they're hurting for a nicotine fix and that, for twenty cents or so, he makes an instantaneous friend or it becomes an introduction to start a conversation. I think tattoos do that, but in a more profound way. It is an immediate conversation starter, and "in" to closer contact, a gateway into a alternative mindset.

I like my characters to have tattoos and smirk and smoke and drink and do all the varied things that I decline to do, not because I'm not adventurous (okay, I may be), but outwardly I like to showcase my inward thoughts that are always changing and shifting, to the extent that my characters are swirling in a chaotic spiral on the page. When I analyze this, it scares me that the haphazard manner I draw is a reaction to needing that new stimulus, that new energy all the time. Either that, or I'm as neurotic as hell and I need to be psychoanalized.

I don't know whether choosing one set image or images would ever satisfy me. So, I start a new page with new faces on new characters brandishing their new tattoos in a vicarious existence that gives me peace of mind.

At least my invented friends on the page are changeable and malleable, too.

Amorality and Selfishness...

I'm reading the quote of Angelina Beloff, Diego Rivera's first wife, after he abandoned her for a series of other women, and I'm amazed how off-the-cuff, how disinterested, the statement sounded to my ears. "He has never been a vicious man, but simply an amoral one. His painting is all he ever lived for and deeply loved."

And then I thought, "Hell, the entire premise of TMZ and tabloid television is based solely on this reality." We admire our artists to the extent that we tolerate any amoral behavior, so long as they're not vicious or abusive or murderous. We live out our fantasies vicariously through their exploits and we crave the sensuous, the decadent, and the vivacious characters surrounding their worlds. We embrace that life force, that vitality...and that amorality, it just makes them more colorful and engaging.

Well, I am not so much the gigantic figure that lights up the room, that becomes the immediate beacon that all others cling to or gravitate towards. But I do understand the nature of selfish behavior and the struggle to maintain a balance with my art and the outside world. It's a part of my personality I don't always like confronting: I understand that my strong desire and drive to do creative things will take away time from my family, my friends, my loved ones, but the need to create supersedes all other connections. I succumb to my selfish whims every time.

But it's not like I shun all of humanity. I like to hold a table at a cafe and invite my friends along, to bring work, to enjoy the day, but few have the stamina to read a book or to draw or to sit for hours on end in conversation. I'm reading the stories of the cafes in Paris and Montparnesse, in the time where the great artists like Matisse and Picasso broke bread with poets like Apollinaire and played chess, talked art and ate themselves through menu after menu of good food and wine and fine coffees and pastry. These were the lean years of their youths, where they left sketches and paintings for the cafe owners for the loan for a meal or a bottle of wine. And they ate and talked and enjoyed life before the wars came and tore apart their idyllic worlds.

It's very hard to strive for a full, idyllic, artistic life. So much of reality pounces on that fantasy and pulls it toward the mundane tasks of living. And in those moments where I can find time to be with my sketchbooks and my thoughts and my omnipresent ipod, I guard them jealousy and savor them when they are good and productive. I understand my own selfishness at those moments and my need to be apart from the bustling crowd. During those times, slowness and contemplation are my well-worn friends.

Everything, these days, is increasingly connected with high speed, instantaneous velocity. After a day of zoning out on my PC or my laptop, I crave those selfish moments to tune out the rapid fire pace of life and relish the simplicity and slow ease of pencil on paper or ink on the crisp, tactile page. Good coffee or a cold iced-tea also helps to sustain me and gives me a boost, but my internal drive can chug along so long as I can maintain this invisible force-field to keep the manic world at bay.

I may not be amoral...but selfishness I understand.

Bucolic Ease and the Strawberry Marshmellow Butterfly Princess...

I'm reading about Diego Rivera and his return trip he made to Montparnesse where he meets Picasso, Chagall, Duchamp and Matisse and revels in the "bucolic ease of the cafes", and I think to myself, however joyous and satisfying my sketching excursions seem to be, they are always tinged with the ugliness of the modern world. In fact, I'm convinced that there is a marked cosmic conspiracy to rattle my cage on a daily basis.

If it's not the cigar smokers that repeatedly spew their stink in my direction at what was once my favorite cafe, then it's the little Mexican man on the scooter who continues to rub me the wrong way. Every day, without fail, he drives his Rascal scooter uptown and parks on the other side of the sidewalk, directly across from my favorite table. He never orders food, but he sets out water for the tiny chihuahua that rides in his basket, takes out a book, and chain smokes putrid cigarettes one by one and blows the smoke directly in my face. The wind always seems to be right. Day in and day out he does this...like the universe is in on this grand joke to see how long it will take me to break.

At a Starbucks I sketch at, there's an enormous man with the saddest face I have ever seen on a human being that sits down on the comfy chairs and falls asleep for four or five hours at a time. He sputters and gurgles and snores heavily, but he usually orders a sandwich and a coffee so they never turn him away. He slumps into the chair and his tiny, tiny striped shirt always rides up revealing a bloated, pink stomach with an enormous, bulbous hernia just over his belly button. It's huge, like a baby's head, and it juts out like a lighthouse beacon, commanding the attention of the entire room. There's no escaping it...it's like his second head is watching you. Teenagers giggle and point at it. Small children cry into their mother's arms at the strange mutation. It got to be so depressing that I had to move on.

Oh, and then there's the homeless guy (who might be a veteran) at Borders who brings in his duffel bag filled with war games and plastic army men. He takes armfuls of expensive books on World War II, cracks them open to a double-page spread of some explosive battle and sets up his plastic army soldiers, his movable tanks and helicopters and plays warfare out in the middle of the cafe. He takes up at least two tables to do this, but everyone sensing that the camouflage wearing crazy person just might be a wounded vet, give him a wide berth to carry out the strategic air assaults in his head. He's actually a kind, docile soul who'll ask very politely, very shyly, for money for a cup of soup or a coffee. They treat him kindly there, but when he gets going, he becomes a serious distraction, especially when he starts making airplane noises and dive bombs his coffee with half-chewed pieces of biscotti.

At one time, the cafe used to sponsor art shows...that is until the neighborhood artist colony took over the wall completely. Then it became a series of bad art done by retired grandmas and grandpas...lots of oil paintings of barns and pet cats and fruit baskets. There was one artist in the bunch who was good, but his sole subject matter, month to month, was a lone giant rooster on a four foot by six foot canvas. They were always beautifully rendered, right down to the intricate patterning of the feathers. They were quite nice, except for the fact that they dominated the space and the damned eyes seemed to follow you around, and the fact that someone, at least once a day, would say aloud, "Now that's a giant cock!" and set the entire cafe laughing. Hard to concentrate with that around...

And then it was bad folk singer night. Every night, at 7 or 8 pm, they would clear a makeshift stage for some acoustic musician that would entertain for a stipend of books. Most nights it was frightened kids trying out a list of new songs, or some bad bar singer that wanted to play a new venue...or it was the Strawberry Marshmellow Butterfly Princess. That wasn't her name, but it's what the cynical teenage baristas that had to work the cafe called her. She had to live close by, because she seemed to find a spot every time the cafe entertainment flaked out, which was often, and she became the resident fill in. Oh, she was an obnoxious New Age singer. Imagine the annoying girlfriend from Spinal Tap wearing a diaphanous, draped ensemble with flowing scarves playing an over sized Ovation guitar with inlaid butterflies in the design. She would artistically arrange her CD's on the table next to her, and by the time she was into her set of schmaltzy mysticism and her cloying goddess-theology songs, she would empty out the entire cafe except for the pissed off baristas, who got very little in their tip jars, and the old men who stayed until closing time reading magazines. At those moments, I would rudely tune her out with my headphones and my sketchbooks. And she played and she played the same songs over and over again. On many nights they would start to close down the lights on her...and it was sad to see this stoic, little red-headed folk singer in front of a painting of a giant rooster, singing to lonely old men reading magazines, an artist tuning her out with headphones, and a straggly, bearded, camouflaged homeless vet dive-bombing his plastic platoon with half-chewed Italian cookies.

Sometimes, I wonder if it's just karmic retribution...that we can't have joy come to us so easily in this world, that we are forced to endure the struggle in order to reach Paradise. I feel that it is either God laughing at me, or it is the Devil fucking with me, and I can't tell which it is from moment to moment. Or maybe it's the world at large that is too crowded with craziness to let us enjoy the "bucolic ease" of anything, anymore...

Chasing R. Crumb...

I was sketching in the Gypsy Den in Santa Ana a few months ago. I got there early so I could sketch for several hours before the gallery next door opened at noon. They were featuring a traveling show that included original work by R. Crumb, and I waited like an anxious fanboy for the chance to see one of my hero's works up close.

I came to be a fan of Crumb very late, but it was never for the perverse subject matter, the sexism or the racism that he detailed (with scathing irony and dark humor), it was solely about technique and the masterful way he handled the page.

My earliest influence (apart from Michelangelo) was Dr. Seuss. If you went beyond the whimsical poetry and studied his intricate, energetic cross-hatching...wow, the man was a force to be reckoned with. Such masterful pen strokes...such expression and verve. Every mark was joyous and funny and deft. Seeing his work up close at a gallery made me weep. A true master.

Then it was Maurice Sendak, who was much quieter, but a master, nonetheless, of pen-and-ink crosshatching. And then I got warped by the "MAD" geniuses, especially Jack Davis and Mort Drucker. I think they warped a lot of young artist's minds in the 70's and 80's.

But Crumb...there was something about Crumb that made me connect with him more fervently than any other cartoonist outside of Winsor McCay. There was something that was tragically human about the skinny geek, something that I felt brought us into a spiritual kinship.

I'm sketching at the Gypsy Den, and the atmosphere is thrift-store bohemian. There are cheap Persian rugs on the wall along with hanging paper lanterns, nick-knacks and dusty student art, hanging with frames and without, in a chaotic quest to balance the negative spaces. The coffee comes in heavy, bulbous cups that warm and soothe. The food is organic and healthy. And the waitresses seem like ultra-hip art students that pass by, taking orders, aloof and harried.

They take no notice of me...but when I break out the sketchbook, I attract attention. It's not always good, kind of like people who have interesting tattoos or piercings attract fans of those things. It's an immediate conversation starter. It buffers those awkward social moments and gives me an "in" to begin interacting with people that normally wouldn't give me the time of day.

That's what draws me to Crumb, I think. I remember seeing the documentary, Crumb, by Terry Zwigoff, his friend, and seeing that socially inept, geeky persona was not just a persona. There was some deep and dark hurt that isolated him. He was constantly being hounded by anauthoritarian father, a self-medicating mother, fucked-up siblings, and a bullying world that took one look at the scrawny, bird-like, weakling and tried to crush him at every opportunity.

I relate to that, being endomorph to Crumb's ectomorph. I'm the fat guy who no one pays attention to until they see me drawing. I related to that need to slink away and to escape into sketchbooks, without the pressure of doing fine, exact work, but letting the mind open up to explorations of the moment. I pictured him in cafes, drawing, keeping things internal...letting in only those that understood that same isolation or that same need for expression.

So when I heard those same dusty sketchbooks were traded to Fantagraphics publishing for a villa in France (where he still resides) and his sketches that he scribbles on napkins when he waits for food in French cafes command thousands in galleries, I think that his career was more about self-preservation than anything else. He struggled to find that bit of respect and dignity and live a creative life without apology. And he succeeded. I admire that.

As the gallery opens, I view Crumb's work; from his crude, linear early sketchbooks to his high point in the late 60's and early 70's, to his quieter moments of American nostalgia and deep love for the blues, jazz and early roots music, it is a good sampling of his career. It wasn't always the pornographic, prurient Crumb that enticed me...it was the artist that explored all facets of his psyche as well as keeping a keen eye on American society and dared to tell all of our dirty secrets.

But seeing the control of his medium, the delicate cross-hatching he mastered, he could be in league with Hogarth or Durer. I look at his work and it inspires me...but mostly, I see the skinny man, with the heart of a wounded child, entirely alone with his thoughts of the world, armed with only a sketchbook and a rapidograph pen...sketching to fill in the many voids of his life.

Oracles and Mystics...

"The Oracle" sits at his table, sipping his iced-tea. He's a scary dude. He intimidates with his biker build and his eye, which is pale blue and clouded over. Like the old man in Poe's "Tell Tale Heart", he has the vulture eye...all seeing.

He rides his Harley up into the patio area and sits with all the regulars. He makes a killer marinara sauce from scratch that takes days, he says. And he believes that the entire town is a portal to demon infestation.

He can tell you who is demon possessed and what particular demon is possessing them. He knows all the scumbags and tweakers and it is his mission, like a paladin, to cleanse the town of any evil that befalls the good and the pure of heart. He points them out to me, sometimes.

There's a scary old man who clings to the neighborhood runaways and street kids. "Beware", says the Oracle. Another young man dresses in a monk's robe and carries a dangling crucifix as he carts a ten foot cross up and down the street on roller skate wheels. "Do not be swayed by false prophets," says the Oracle. Sitting alongside this man, I see the dark underbelly of my city start to come alive. Sitting outside at the cafe on a workday, the sociopaths and the street criminals bask in the sunshine and go about their days and the Oracle keeps a close watch on everyone.

I know there is no demon portal, and just because someone is strange or psychologically maladjusted doesn't mean they're demon-possessed, but sitting with this man and listening to him speak gives me strange insights into some deviant souls. Also, I know the man is a complete loon...but he's an entertaining, insightful loon.

Not only is he well read on the Bible, he quotes apocalyptic scriptures as if the world were ending that very day. He quotes from ancient texts and mystics new and old. He reads Velikovsky and Carl Sagan and is convinced that he alone can interpret the day that the comet will strike the earth and end all of human existence. He's predicted the end of the world three times since I've known him.

Each time, he quietly announces that he will seek seclusion and disappears for weeks at a time. I tell him, "If we're both here in a month's time, then you owe me an iced-tea." He owes me three iced-teas. Usually, he says that the signs were convoluted...something was misread.

But he returns...riding his Harley, claiming his seat under the cool awning. People seek him out, ask his advice on things mundane and supernatural. I like to think that my town has a mystical paladin, a spiritual protector...he's our own Buffy without the cuteness and the sharpened stakes and the kick-ass jujitsu moves.

I like that he knows the harmful and the deceitful in this place. They might not all be the minions of demons, but he knows the bad from the good and he ruthlessly defends the rights of the good. I'll settle for that. I'll take my seat and chuckle quietly and cynically while waiting for my iced-teas and the end of the world that is heading our way in 2012. Or whenever the Oracle goes into hiding.

Saint Joe...

Saint Joe and his friends are milling about the outside tables, smoking and passing around their clipboards with their bright yellow legal pads. It's Tuesday in Uptown and that means that this motley crew is preparing for their TV appearances on local cable access.

It's like Steinbeck's Cannery Row, here, with St. Joe and his ragtag bunch. For three minutes, they can get up to the podium and speak at the cable televised City Council meeting, and they take these moments to do their prep work. For Joe, it's all about the trolley cars. For every Tuesday, for the last two decades or more, he's taken up his soapbox for trolleys. Every city, he believes, should have a fleet of nostalgic trolley cars whisking people around town. Young and old love trolley cars...they're American as apple pie and picnics on the Fourth of July.

If it's not trolley cars that he's rallying for, it's to have a statue of Mother Teresa built to bless all of humanity. Every week it's one or the other. For nearly 30 years St. Joe has taken up causes for the little guy, poor tired souls that never catch a break. He's like "Da Mayor" in Spike Lee's, Do the Right Thing. He's always around and everyone knows him. He has his finger on the pulse of everything that goes on in his city. And instead of stoop, he stands or sits in front of his trolley bus...maybe you'll pay him a visit and shake his hand. Here's a poem I wrote for him.

St. Joe and the Statue of Love...

saint joe wants a statue of Mother Teresa

to restore grace

and dignity

to the wretched and the poor

and to the downtrodden

and to the homeless,

and to the sick,

and to the needy,

and to the out-of-luck,

and to the out-of-work,

and to the walking aimless who sleep in the park

waiting for their next charity meal.

saint joe wants to place the statue

on a rolling trailer

behind his paneled van with

placards and signs to give hope to

all his friends living in the streets.

saint joe wants to build his statue of love

out of bronze,

or wood,

or marble,

if someone would only sculpt it for him...

that's all he wants...a statue of Mother Teresa

to drive around town

offering blessings;

not a bad calling for one's life...

to be singularly obsessed with

peace and love.

Bad Catholics...

A female cousin once looked at my sketchbooks and claimed they were too edgy, too seedy and not appropriate for her kids to view. Of course, at the time, she had converted from her Catholic upbringing to a kinder, gentler "Kumbaya Christian"...a feel-good version of Christianity based on the New Testament with an egalitarian, all-embracing, loving Christ.

Every year, Claro's Italian Deli gives our family an Italian calendar that highlights the ungodly number of Saint's Days and always features a soft-focus painting of Jesus of Nazareth in a pasture, holding a fluffy lamb and surrounded by attentive children. It's like they've scrapped the Old Testament altogether, everything has a soft, frosty glow. And Christ has this chiseled, Nordic look with long blond hair and manicured beard. So squeaky clean and wholesome.

Whatever became of the duality of good and evil? Of sin and redemption? I admit that I'm a bad Catholic...a lapsed Catholic, but the things I admire about the religion are being scrubbed away to make it palpable to this fuzzy, touchy-feely Christianity.

I'm channeling Michelangelo these days...I'm very consumed by Renaissance histories and biographies and I'm very much in tune with his art and his spirituality and his poetry. He held a very pragmatic approach to his religion and he held his own against the papal censors and even the pope himself to interpret scripture without the pretense of halos, or wings upon angels, or embellished robes and jewelled garments. The poor and the humble of the Bible were depicted as being poor and humble; those that were tormented and anguished tore their clothing or writhed in pain; those that were larger-than-life became Titans in the heavenly realm.

I like the disparity between Michelangelo's Jesus as the central figure in the Last Judgement, with his rippling, bulging ab's and gargantuan thighs and the lean, sorrowful, lithe Jesus in the Pieta. No comfortable, Hallmark card versions of Christianity here.

So, even if I don't agree with the Catholic Church's stance on abortion, gay marriage, the marriage of priests, bishops and cardinals, women's ordination, the fallibility of the Pope, the Holocaust denials, teaching sensible reproductive practices instead of just abstinence, and a host of other modern social issues...I'll take the oppressive guilt of original sin and Catholic suffrage over the pastoral lamb and the cute, cuddly singing congregation of happy Christians.

Guitars and the singing of "Kumbaya" should never be allowed in church.

Walking the earth, living on the bum...

The homeless are outside my window, plucking out used coffee cups from the trash and emptying the spent fluids into the bushes. They take in the coffee cups and pay the 50 cent refill price, which the barristas give them...they've been there most of the morning, thumbing through the old newspapers that are stuffed into the racks, so the counter people can never really tell if they bought the original drink at full price. Just another way of getting by, I guess.

I'm sketching just inside to their little circle outside on the patio. There used to be an old lady who collected the used newspapers in brown paper sacks. She was so old, so shrunken. She didn't have a tooth in her head and she flicked her tongue out in quick, repetitive jabs like a gecko sensing its surroundings...flick, flick, flick. And, damn it if she didn't clean out the used papers just before I got to them.

I heard a rumor that firemen had to clean out her apartment because she had created this labyrinthine maze with walls made out of towering newspaper stacks. I like to think that she created this mythical persona, like the Minotaur in her maze of yellowing pages...I like to think she was just eccentric...but it's more like senility or madness or old age and loneliness that create these fringe impulses.

One of the old timers is fishing about for cigarette butts in the ash cans outside. He's collected three that seem to have several puffs of smoke left in them. He arranges them by size, one next to the other, rolling them under his fingers lovingly as if he doesn't know yet which of his beloved children he wants to smoke first. He is long in choosing. Then he smokes one and the ecstasy on his face is exquisite...everything quiets down and he is content for that one second.

I used to romanticize about what it would be like to be homeless. Like Jules, the Samuel L. Jackson character in Pulp Fiction, I fantasized about "Walking the earth"...about traveling from place to place, meeting people and having adventures with my sketchbook in tow, living on the bum. But the reality of life on the streets hits me starkly, especially when I carve out a chunk of my day to sit down and draw. The homeless are always here, not by choice, but by necessity...to find that clean, well-lighted place and to feel safe and connected to decent people living decent lives and to meet their friends at a coffeehouse where there is cheap coffee and free smokes and a free, previously read newspaper if you can find one.

I Don't Do Cute...

There's a sweet, dowdy little waitress that walks around the tables at the cafe and each time she sees me sketching, she stops to check out the daily page I'm working on. Each time she comments on how talented I am in a cloying, sugary manner that just gets my hackles flaring upward in sharp, jagged spikes of disdain.

I know she means well, but lately she's been saying things like "You know (Think of a whiny, Mid-Western voice), you'd do better with your drawings if you put a nice Pilgrim hat on that one. Maybe have them standing by some pumpkins! People love holiday artwork."

It's one of those moments when you wish your eyeballs shot laser beams, or that 14" spikes jutted out each white knuckle and ripped through your enemy's jugular. One swipe, whoooosh!!!
Blood spurt and gore; nothing but ragged carcass and a puddle of viscous fluids.

I wanted to shake her meaty, hunched shoulders and shout out into her shriveled, apple-pie face and scream out "I don't draw Pilgrim hats on anything...no Pilgrim hats whatsoever!!!! No Pilgrim hats and no smiley pumpkins!"

I'm sorry, but I don't do cute. I like squalor and dirty, gritty people with a lot of soul. I like down and outers, riff-raff, and drifters dark and brooding and sinister. I always vote for the underdog. I'll bet the long shot just because I like the longshot.

I hate the average, the sensible, though I'm surrounded by it constantly. Sure and steady really bores me to tears, and perky people make me want to stab my quilled pens neatly and swiftly into their soft, blood-filled orifices. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating.

Cuteness...cuteness, I refuse to acknowledge. Give me ugly and depressing. Tom Waits in a cheap diner surrounded by misfits and miscreants. Give me sob stories told really well by those clinging to their last vestiges of dignity and hope. I like to see the struggle, like to trace the history of the scars.

Cute. Can't do it. Don't even ask. Leave pumpkins and Pilgrim to five year old kids putting their holiday projects on the fridge with magnets. Let them have cute.

Tragedy of the Leaves and the Limbo of old age...

I'm sketching at Panera Bread today, which seems the modern day equivalent of the cafeterias of the 1930's, where the entrees were sold through slotted vending windows and everything cost a nickel. This is Hemingway's "clean, well-lighted place."

This one is in an outdoor mall, adjacent to a senior center, so the place is wall-to-wall seniors lining up for their lukewarm ladel of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup in a hallowed out round of sourdough bread. My God! Such expectant, joyous faces.

I'm listening to The Throwing Muses song "Limbo" on my ipod while I let my hand sketch over the page. It's an unconscious act, completely devoid of thought. I scan the room as the music picks up the soundtrack. All those happy, pale, wrinkled faces slurping their soup and gnashing their crusty baguettes while Kristin Hersh repeats the haunting lyrics, "nice Limbo you have here, nice Limbo you have here..." It's quite eerie, mesmerizing even. In the a-capella bridge she repeats the line to a thumping beat, "dead is next door, dead is next door." I look up at the overly rouged faces, the sagging arms, the bruised, crackly flesh and think "yes, dead is next door."

I picked up a used copy of an older Bukowski poetry compilation that I did not have, but I recognized the first poem as one that rips my heart out every time I read it. The poem is called "The Tragedy of the Leaves" and I pick it up to read it in the lull between changing the music and starting a new, fresh page. I'm fixated on the old people. So many old people here today, and they are nothing like the aging Bukowski who continued to booze it up, to womanize, to bet the ponies at Santa Anita, to write amazing poems until he died at the age of 74. He would have shot cannonballs into the center of the restaurant and laughed at the mound of rotting, charred corpses and screwed every underage waitress as the wreckage smoldered. He wouldn't have been content, never have been ecstatic for a mediocre bowl of tepid cream soup. I keep reading and re-reading the same section over and over again...

"I shaved carefully with an old razor

the man who had once been young

and said to have genius; but

that's the tragedy of the leaves,

the dead ferns, the dead plants;

and I walked into a dark hall

where the landlady stood

execrating and final,

sending me to hell,

waving her fat, sweaty arms

and screaming

screaming for rent

because the world had failed us

both "

Rips and shreds my soul apart every time I read it and

then Hope Sandoval comes on the ipod next and sends me

sinking into deeper, darker waters of despair.

My war with the cigar smokers...

I have a strange love/ hate relationship with cigar smokers. I love to sketch them...but to be honest, I want them all to die slow, lingering deaths like Freud, with their throats corroding and shrivelling with black, cancerous lesions. But I love to draw them.

I understand the hypocrisy, I just don't understand my attraction.

I think it's the phallic nature of the cigar. Maybe it's the primal clutching of the penis-like extension of the self or it's the orgasmic looks on their faces as they take their first, oh-so satisfying puffs.

When I draw them, I think I'm attracted to the intimate quietness of the fingers and the thumbs on the cigar. It's a very dainty and loving and tender gesture. As is the licking and the sucking in of the white smoke, which, incidentally, for me, smells like a dead skunk decaying on a quiet country road. It sickens me...one of the few things that triggers my gag reflex. Thus, my internal war with the cigar smokers continues to vex me.

Okay, I'll admit that they have taken over my favorite outdoor cafe where I like to sketch. I hate to think it's a male territorial imperative to protect my personal space. But there are other regulars around me, equally annoying, like the mentally-challenged giant with the too-tiny stripped shirt who whistle screams as he bites his fist with one hand and thumps his barrel chest with lowland gorilla-like force in a continuous monotone that can only be compared to a beached manatee pounded by whiffle bats. The noise is stunning and ominous. But still, I can tune him out. What I can't tune out it the wafting stench of cigar smoke under my nose.

I've tried everything to get them to stop. I've pleaded. I've threatened them with going to the Board of Health. But their arrogance and their senses of entitlement have made them cluster together in tight, self-righteous groups of smoke-spewing smugness. They won't budge and the owner is too afraid to drop kick his regular paying customers from enjoying their outdoor smoker's lounge. Our latest attempt at peace accord, is to let them smoke at the furthest tables, away from the front awning. Still, the smoke travels, and I swear that it finds my nostrils every time.

So, I have to grin and bear it. Suck it up and tune out the stink if I want to sit at my table, sketching and sipping at my bottomless iced tea. I don't have to like it. My only just revenge is to post my sketches and give them humorous subtitles that remind me of the time I suffered with my discomfort to get the money shots.