That R. Crumb comic page nearly everyone knows titled, Keep On Truckin’…which he called “the curse of my life” and “that stupid little cartoon” because it’s been so ripped off and commercialized…that’s actually his riff on a 1936 song by Blind Boy Fuller titled Truckin’ My Blues Away. Each panel in the comic has a line from the song, and a Crumb drawing of various city folks strutting along to the tune. It was a fun little comic and I am truly sorry it caused Crumb so much grief when the rest of the world seemingly just appropriated it. But that happens to artists when some random little thing they do suddenly clicks in the mass conscious. At least he finally did get his copyright back on the artwork.

When I thought to do my own take on Randy Newman’s You Can Leave Your Hat On, I decided to do it in the spirit of the R. Crumb comic, with each panel containing a line from the song and some artwork to go with it, but not an exact rendering of the song, just letting the artwork bop along with it. And I am making Amazing progress on it now. A big part of that is self acceptance of the fact that I’m not a fast worker, I can’t just dash out a drawing, and that I am a hunt and peck draftsman and that is how it will always be. And so I’m finally adjusting my work habits and expectations around all that, instead of trying to be something I am not because I believed I should be that or I wasn’t any good. Also, that I need to walk away from the work periodically and come back to it to see it with fresh eyes, and see what is right and what needs more work.

I find that I am at my best when I let my work habits align with my nature and that I can push myself to get it right if I align my work habits with how my brain tackles a problem. It’s okay to be a hunt and peck draftsman. It’s okay to take my time on a drawing if it’s having a difficult time coming together. It is important to not accept less than the best I can do. I have to look away from my drawing board periodically or I stop seeing the whole for that one part of it I’m struggling with. Once I did a drawing of a seated barefooted figure, and I didn’t notice until I saw the finished strip on the computer screen that I’d drawn them reversed left/right. ACK! See…I drew him with his legs crossed but I put the feet where they would have been if his legs weren’t crossed. I didn’t notice the mistake I was making while I was making it, because I was so focused on getting the feet right. ACK! I fixed it in the computer but it’s still like that on the original artwork. This is what happens if I don’t take short breaks from the drafting table and then come back to it with fresh eyes. If I give it enough time and sweat the thing I want to happen on the drawing board eventually does happen. It’s okay not to hurry it.

The great political cartoonist David Low once said of his workflow that each cartoon took three days to do: two days spent in labor, and one day spent removing the appearance of labor. Herblock did a cartoon every day for the Washington Post for decades and his best was every bit the equal of Low’s. We’re all different in that way. You work what you got.

I’m finally starting to make some kind of progress at the drafting table that I was hoping for when I retired. Apart from A Coming Out Story, I’ve had several other things that I began working on years ago that I’m beginning to make some progress on, and some new stuff too. But alas, some of that is not going to be visible here because it isn’t safe for work. For nearly all my life I’ve had a reticence about certain subjects that you generally don’t see in a graphic artist. At least not in the free world. I’ve lived with it, made excuses for it, and ignored it. But there are some things I want to do now that I’ve retired, things I want to explore, and that reticence is something I have to deal with if I want to make progress. 

Mind, I don’t do pornography. Pornography is obvious and cheap and all it does is push buttons. But I have struggled for nearly three years now with a short graphic story riffing on the song You Can Leave Your Hat On, ever since I first heard it at a gig my classmate Rev Billy did with another band, and it’s been basically about this deeply ingrained reluctance I’ve always had about

about

about

about nudity in my artwork. There. I said it. Specifically about how much to show. If you’ve read the first episode of A Coming Out Story, that gag came about when I realized that I simply could not draw the character representing my libido as a completely naked me, and then realizing that it was right after all because that reticence was a truth about me after all.

“I’m your libido, not Robert Crumb’s libido.”  It was a self truth that became the series running gag. Ha ha. 

The song I was listening to in that bar that night, waiting for my classmate to take the stage again, was about a guy asking what I assumed was his girlfriend to take off her clothes and give him a dance. The line You can leave your hat on, recurs throughout. That first time I was listening to it, it seemed your usual pop heterosexual love and desire song, a little odd for a Randy Newman song, but he has a very wide range and I have loved his movie music, especially for Avalon and Pleasantville. So I was sitting in this bar among a bunch of middle aged and older (like myself) customers observing the crowd and waiting for my classmate to get his turn on stage. Everyone was getting into the song…

Baby, take off your coat… (real slow)
Baby, take off your shoes… (here, I’ll take your shoes)
Baby, take off your dress
Yes, yes, yes
You can leave your hat on
You can leave your hat on
You can leave your hat on

And this was the sort of bar crowd I’m not usually in the middle of and I’m almost zoning out just then because these sort of pop tunes never speak to me. If I really like a song and it’s your usual boy loves girl loves boy song I’ll mentally change the pronouns in it so it can speak to me too. I am barely a post Stonewall gay guy and living in a pop culture that until recently simply refused to even admit that such as I existed, I’ve had to do that all my adult life. But I’m watching the crowd and they’re loving the song and having a good time and I will never begrudge anyone that. This poor angry world would be a lot nicer and a lot more peaceful I’m thinking if everyone could have a fulfilling sex life.

Then I hear this…

Suspicious minds are talking
Trying to tear us apart
They say that my love is wrong
They don’t know what love is
They don’t know what love is
They don’t know what love is
They don’t know what love is
I know what love is

…and suddenly now the song is speaking to me and I’m fully absorbed. Wow.

I’m pretty sure Newman didn’t intend this to be a song about a gay male couple…the dancer was asked to take their dress off after all.  And heterosexuals often get static from their families and communities over their choices in love. But those lyrics…those lyrics. When I heard them I knew I had to do my own take on the song. I listened to it carefully and when I got home that night I bought several copies of it in the iTunes store. And I listened, and the entire thing I wanted to draw, the artwork, all the panels and the layout, came to me.

I knew it had to feature the guy I’d drawn about that same time, after some babbling nitwit online complained that gay guys at Pride were all wearing nothing but short shorts and go-go boots…

He was already wearing a hat, which made him perfect for the role of the dancer in the song. Mr Homophobic nitwit hadn’t said anything about a hat, but I added one on an impulse when I drew him because I thought it added to his sexiness.

I had a good idea of what the singer looked like and was wearing too. Another guy, maybe slightly older, suit and tie like he’s just got home from work and he’s had a very tiresome day and his boyfriend comes over and he asks him to give him a dance and the boyfriend is all in for it. Because at that age one of this life’s simple pleasures is making the one you love all hot and bothered.

So I had my story, I had the layouts, I knew Exactly what every panel was going to look like. Sort of. Then I sat down to actually draw it my built-in reticence about nudity kicked right in. I kept trying to draw the dancer in the song tastefully if minimally covered, because deep down I just could not go where the song went.

I had reasons. Perfectly logical reasons. That left/right brain running gag in A Coming Out Story is no joke. I wanted my take on the song to be postable most anywhere. I wanted it to be safe for work. I don’t do pornography. But nudity isn’t necessarily pronographic unless you’re a right wing nutcase, and truth be told, somewhere deep down there were fears that at age sixty-nine I still hadn’t really examined.

Charlie Chaplin writing to his daughter said…

“Your naked body should only belong to those who fall in love with your naked soul.”

The artist shows their naked soul in every work they produce. But giving the world the naked bodies of my art subjects just cut too close to the bone…so to speak. I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t shame, it was if I’m honest, a deeply ingrained fear of being vulnerable I’ve had since grade school. And of being Scrawny. Weak. Ugly. I was a slight, somewhat girlish kid and I got a lot of bullying from some of the other kids, and a lot of body shaming by adults in my life for being so thin and unmuscular. The mother of one of my classmates asked him outright if I was a heroin addict. Ragweed season always made me look like I was on drugs all the time. My clothes, mostly second hand, never really fit very well. My teeth were crooked. 

There’s a story I like to tell about the day I came to class in sixth grade. Next year I would be in junior high school which I’d learned by then was a whole new world. Instead of sitting in the same classroom day and and day out I would be given a schedule of classes for math, english, science and art and so on, and walk from one to the other. I’d have my own locker to put things in between classes. And every class would be a different teacher, and a different mix of other kids. But there was a very unpleasant surprise in store.

That one day in that sixth grade class I saw that some kids from the previous year had come to class before we got there to visit their old teachers. They’d written about their experiences in junior high on the chalkboard. I started reading. Then I came to this line…

Tell them not to worry about group showers. It’s no big deal.

I wish I had a picture of my face just then. My jaw dropped. I was horrified. What!? WHAT!? WHAT!!!???  Suddenly I was no longer looking forward to high school, junior or otherwise.

So there I am at the drafting table trying to get this little slice of life story out of me and on to paper, make a statement about gay love and desire, and I’m all inhibited and trying to be restrained and temperate and keeping my dancer suitably covered for family audiences…and the song just doesn’t read like that. Well…except for the hat. There’s still a hat.

So no matter how I drew the dancer I was never satisfied with what I was drawing. I’m pretty sure I got the singer/audience right the first time I drew him. But the dancer just would not appear. Worse, most of my tries were crap that made me doubt I was good enough to even try illustrating this song in my own way. It had to be done right or it would be embarrassingly awful. It was making me hate my drawing and I hate it enough as it is. But it wouldn’t let go of me either. I kept coming back to it, there was something there I wanted to say, and I kept having to walk away depressed.

Finally I had to admit my drawing was crap because I wasn’t really being faithful to the song.

I was riffing on this song because I wanted to shine a light on what it said to me about love and joyful playful desire, and that is universal across the Kinsey scale. It was important to me. Gay love and desire is a beautiful, meaningful, fulfilling thing for those who are lucky enough to find it. And nothing that came out of my pencils was working. Finally I had to admit nothing I did would be right unless I was completely faithful to the song. Which meant that I needed to get over some residual reticence about nudity in my art I’ve had since…forever.

So I’m going for it.

And now it’s working. The dancer is there finally on my drawing board. He’s everything I need him to be to make this graphic story work. This is going to be one of my best.

Problem is, it won’t be safe for Facebook. Or any social media.

That’s okay…I have my own website here.

And at age 69 I feel a little more free. One less brick in the wall…

I have several ongoing or recurring dreams. Most are just me wandering around places in Rockville around the time I was growing up there. Those were pretty important times in my life so it’s not unusual to be having dreams about them. Often they get mixed up with places and things happening to me now. I’m my dreams I’ve wandered around apartment complexes containing elements of every place I’ve ever lived. So much so obvious. And those dreams are usually kinda fun. I’m old enough now that when the dreams get unpleasant I just shrug it off when I wake up. But there is one dream I started having a few years ago that I wish would stop.

I had it again this morning. It’s the dream where I’ve sold or traded in the Mercedes for another car. Sometimes it’s a basic economy car like a Corolla, and sometimes it’s a small sports car. Once it was a 70s Ford Mustang. But I always end up becoming unsatisfied with the car I have, and always end up kicking myself all through the dream for giving up the Mercedes, and knowing that I will never be able to afford another one. By dream’s end I am miserable. Why did I do that I keep asking myself. Over and over. Why did I do that. There was no reason for me to do that. Now I’ll never own another one.

Sometimes the dream follows the path I took to Mercedes ownership. First I have the little white C class. Then I trade that in for the E class diesel. But then I give up the E class, trading it for a less expensive car, or some sort of sports car, and the dream goes downhill from there. I wish I knew what this dream was telling me. I am Never getting off my E class diesel. At least not willingly. That car is my dream come true car. It’s the car I want to drive to the end of the road with. 

Last month I spent the holidays in California visiting my brother. I took the train because it was just a visit over the holidays and I didn’t want to be driving through snow and ice if the weather turned bad. I got a good rental car for the duration, a new Hyundai Elantra. It was a fine car, well built, and it had some features I wish my 2012 Mercedes did. But I spent the entire time I was out there missing my E class (I’ve named it Spirit). The instant I got back home I took it for a drive, allegedly to give it a quick run after it sat in front of the house for a month, but more like I just missed it so much.

I am never willingly getting off that car. If the worst happens and it gets wrecked somehow, I’ll go looking for a used (sorry…Previously Owned) Mercedes, count on it. Probably a W204 C class like the first one I bought because they’re actually affordable to someone on retirement income like me. But if I could find a restored or at least rust free 240D with a stick that would be ideal. Those cars are legendary for their rock solid build. So it isn’t like I can’t ever have another one like I’m telling myself in this dream.

I wish I knew why this dream keeps bothering me. It’s not about the car…it’s about something else I’m fussing over deep in my subconscious. But what? I’ve no idea. I wish it would just stop. It wakes me up in a very disturbed state and it takes me the rest of the day to let go of it.

I was out and about with the Hasselblad over at that new rowhouse development nearby that’s been a muse ever since they started building it. I looked outside and checked the sky and it was that good mix of puffy clouds and blue sky that works well with a red filter and my photographic style. I wanted to finish a roll and ended up finishing two. It was more than the creative urge motivating me though. I’d just spent some out of budget money on a previously owned medium format camera of a type I’d own previously and sold perhaps recklessly. And that came about because of a really bad experience with that Canon R mirrorless digital camera I briefly owned that I’m still chewing on all this time later, after I traded it in for a full frame 6D and several good primes. Yes it was that painful.

Supposedly those mirrorless cameras are the latest and greatest but the fact was that camera kept getting in my way. It kept overriding my settings on ISO and shutter speed. I kept having to fumble with every setting on just about every shoot and it kept jolting me out of my zone. One problem was the control set of the R was just different enough from the Canon EOS digitals I own and have had previously that I was constantly getting confused. Always fumbling with the settings when I wanted most to be paying attention to what I was looking at was irritating, but I figured I’d eventually learn how to adjust the settings on the fly. Then, and quickly, something else began happening regularly that made me angry at the camera. That has never happened to me before.

It kept refusing to take the shot when I pressed the button.

I would press the shutter release and nothing happened. So I’d press it harder and still nothing happened. Cursing soon followed.

Many months later, having traded that camera in for one I could work with, I began thinking that part of the problem I was having is these new mirrorless cameras don’t simply meter the light, they analyse the scene and set the exposure accordingly before you even touch the shutter release. Which they can now because they’re not using one or more CDS cells looking at the light coming in from the lens. There is no mirror, so when the camera is turned on the detector is always seeing what you’re pointing the camera at. What you are seeing in the viewfinder is a computer generated image from the signal coming off the detector.

But there have to be many built-in assumptions going on in those real time analysis and those may not always work for every photographer and every scene. Supposedly there are ways of advising the onboard computer as to how to take the shots they way you want them taken, but those I have seen are cumbersome to use while you are working and trying to stay tuned into what you are seeing. Worse, I began to discover that even when going to an entirely manual mode, that is, I set the ISO, aperture and shutter speed, the camera would still insist that it knew better and would randomly refuse to take a shot when I hit the shutter release.

I think some of the problem there is I am almost always shooting into the sun. That’s part of my style. I don’t always do that, but I do it lots. That can be tricky but it often gets me the emotional feel that I am looking for in a scene. This however goes against the grain of most basic photography courses which will tell you to shoot with the sun at your back. And it’s true that you can almost never go wrong that way if the camera has any halfway decent metering system. My hunch is a lot of digital camera scene analysis computers are set up to expect that. Yes you can choose different modes…landscape, portrait, indoors, and so on…but the rule of thumb is the light is shining on the scene, whatever it is, from behind you, and most of the time I am shooting into the light. This may be confusing whatever algorithms are employed by the camera’s software to analyse a scene.

But I have done this since I was a teenager and I know how to work it. What I’ve always loved about my Canon film cameras is that 12 percent gray rectangle in the middle of the viewfinder is actually a beam splitter and a portion of the light hitting it is being deflected to the light meter. It’s precise in a way center weighted metering just isn’t and I need that extra precision when I’m shooting into the sun. I can sweep that 12 percent rectangle across a region and get an average of it, whereas a spot meter makes me take a lot of separate readings which would slow me down. I can find my middle grays and figure the extent of the range of highs to darks and decide where to set my aperture and shutter speed. Typically I always aim for the fastest speed I can since I almost never use a tripod.

The Canon digital SLRs I’ve had tell me what they’re focusing on but what they are metering has always seemed a bit fuzzy to me. The meters are analysing the scene inside the viewfinder, since until the mirror flops up the detector can’t see anything. I don’t actually know what it is they’re judging it by. But those cameras have a meter and hold function I quickly began using. Basically I would decide on a place to focus and meter, point the camera at it and just press lightly on the shutter release. The camera would focus and meter and I could hold that and re-compose the shot. Fine. Whatever. It worked. I was content.

But the R seemed to just throw all that away. Maybe if I’d studied the manual longer I would have got it. But every avenue I could glean from the manual seemed cumbersome…and just plain weird. I was told in one passage to use the touchscreen on the back to specify where to focus and meter, but that meant I’d have to take my eye away from the viewfinder while working which I deeply dislike. But never mind because I ended up having to turn off the touchscreen (there was a setting) because my nose was always hitting it and causing the camera to suddenly do something I didn’t want. There was a joystick like control on the back that supposedly allowed you to set a spot to focus and meter on, but it just seemed awkward and I never tried it.

The camera was a bundle of distractions. I would set the effective ISO to something and discover sometime later the camera had set it elsewhere. There seemed no way to force the camera to use the fastest possible shutter speed in any semi-auto mode other than aperture priority and use the widest aperture possible all the time. But even then the camera would occasionally balk.

And ultimately it was the nothing happening when I pressed the shutter release that really Really ticked me off. I will endure a lot of struggle to learn new things in the name of progress and personal growth, but by god when I press the shutter release all the way you take the damn shot! If I got it wrong I’ll deal with that. But I press the shutter release, you take the damn shot!

As I said, and obviously, I am still chewing on it. I really wanted to like that camera. The new electronic viewfinders are amazing. But if anything, the experience with the R made me so much closer to my old mechanical film cameras. And…so very happy to see film having a renaissance among young and old alike. Even if it means the good equipment is becoming scarce and expensive.

So…this came in the mail today…

I had one of these for years but ended up selling it to KEH when I needed some spare cash and concluded that since I had the Hasselblad I wouldn’t need it. By then I had the metering prism viewfinder for the Hasselblad which made working with it faster. And with it I found working with the Hasselblad much more like working with any of my 35mm film SLRs. The Mamiya has the typical TLR waist level viewfinder which reverses left and right and that made it hard for me to judge a scene. And no through the lens metering. You can get an eye level metering prism viewfinder that corrects right/left but it seems awkward to hold the camera that way. And I have become accustomed to using a handheld with the Leica, and I think I can work with that backwards left/right thing now. 

And having only one good medium format camera in an age when getting them repaired might be hard, was something I decided was not worth the risk. So I bought another C330. I really like these for their solid heavy duty build and that you could swap out lenses. I don’t think there is another twin lens reflex you can do that on. A 55mm wide angle pair came just today and a correct lens hood for the taking lens is coming soon. I still have the red and orange filters for its lenses.

And when I press the shutter release, it takes the shot. The only reason the Hasselblad won’t is if I’m past the last shot on the roll or I still have the dark slide in. That’s completely reasonable.

I’ll take it for a drive when the weather and the sky look good.