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.