Someone should write a book on that. Anyway…I was curious how the author of The Martian managed it. From what I heard he’d first serialized it on his own website, and somehow that led to it actually being published. So I asked Google…

Andy Weir, author of The Martian, self-published the book in a serial format on his website, chapter by chapter, then made it available as a free ebook, and later on Amazon for $0.99, which led to its success and a traditional publishing deal.

This could work for me except that if A Coming Out Story is any guide I might be months between putting up new chapters of my Not Really A Ghost Story But Sort-Of. And I would need a good editor to finish it properly. It looks to me like Andy Weir didn’t hire one until after his serialize version took off and Crown Books bought in, so maybe that also works because I think it’s going to be another year at least before I finish the story.

I’ve done it before. I had a fantasy series I worked on decades ago up on this website: The Skywatchers of Aden. At the time I didn’t know Aden was an actual city in the middle east. I gave the nation that plays a key role in the stories that name to make it sound like Almost But Not Eden. So if I ever pursued it seriously again I’d probably have to give it a different name. But I think I’m done with those stories. There were other problems with them I’m not sure how to resolve. I had five short stories up and one novelette. If you look at the page source on some of my website pages you can still see references to it.

Anyway…there’s another problem with this plan. I’ve asked for people to take a look at what I have so far (seven chapters) of my story and nobody responded. My website gets next to zero traffic unless I put up more photos of Robbie Benson in cutoffs or instructions on how to draw sexy guys who wear glasses. I have no idea how Andy Weir got all the interest in his story when he was serializing it on his blog and I am clearly utterly incapable of self promotion or I’d have had photo gallery shows and art shows to look back on. My brother tells me frequently that I should self publish A Coming Out Story and I haven’t.

I know what’s missing. I’ve heard it said that behind every great artist is a lover. But…so it goes… I don’t need to be great, just get it out there somewhere it doesn’t die stillborn.

But I’m liking how the story is working out. Got a lot done on it today in fact. I might start to serialize it here. I actually do get some traffic here on A Coming Out Story. It isn’t a lot but it is still very gratifying. Especially when it looks like someone just stumbled onto it and then they go through all the episodes.

I really dislike doing this because it seems so much like begging for attention, but I have a story I’ve been working on for years and I would really like some feedback on it.

It’s a sorta-kinda ghost story but in the vein of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House where the frights don’t come cheaply from blood and gore and monsters that pop out at you, but instead some strange creepy occurrences and things that go bump in the night. Sorta-kinda.

I play with some tropes. The story takes place not an old victorian mansion but a modern office building. The timeframe is the worst of the subprime mortgage collapse which is important to the background of the plot.

My main characters are a young gay male couple going through a bad patch due to money problems brought on by the meltdown, and also the spending habits of one of them. That one accepts a part in a cheap reality TV ghost hunter show to make a few bucks, but also he’s a computer geek…I play some with that trope too…and a rationalist with an obsession for debunking what he considers occult balony.

There are also a handful of other characters, amature ghost hunters and reality TV charlitans. And lurking in the background, a bunch of brutal predatory capitalists involved in building this luxury office building that nobody, including themselves, wants to spend the night in after it was completed. Or any other time of day.

What I’d like to know is the writing good enough it doesn’t bore you to tears reading it? Do my characters seem realistic? Is the dialogue convincing? Does the story make you want to read more as you go along? I’ve only finished (somewhat) six chapters of it and it’s hard to keep going without any feedback. And truth be told I’m still working on the middle part. I know what it has to do, not just how to do it.

The first chapter, which I’ve posted elsewhere, and got some Very good feedback on, is only one page. It basically tells you what the story is about. If it doesn’t interest you it’s okay to bail after that. The second chapter is background for my two main characters and why they got themselves into this reality TV thing. If they don’t interest you go ahead and bail there. The third chapter is exposition, as they’re driving to the site, on the history of the building that’s allegedly haunted. Does this interest you? If not go ahead and bail there. Things don’t really start happening until the fourth chapter and maybe that’s a mistake but I wanted to set the stage and lure the reader in.

Comment on this post (it’s the React! link) or email me if you like at bgarrett@pobox.com (the brucegarrett address is whitelisted so I would need to add you first) and I’ll send you the links to the Google Docs.

Otherwise…pointers to a good editor I can hire to look it over would be welcome too.

I’ve actually restarted work on an art piece I began several years ago and I can’t tell whether that’s improved my head space or that a better headspace has somehow made it possible for me to go back to my drafting table. I suspect it’s the former because I have no idea what could have possibly improved my mindset at this time. But it could be anticipation of my upcoming Walt Disney World DVC vacation. But there’s pain there too, this particular visit.

The art piece is an absolutely unique one for me, in that it’s a pencil and charcoal drawing, no ink, and there will only ever be that one original. Only my oil paintings have been one-offs up to now. The artwork doesn’t scan well but I’ve no plans on making high quality scans anyway. I wanted to try something entirely in pencil and charcoal on high quality cold press paper, not the Strathmore board I usually use for my artwork. That sort of paper is usually used for water colors but I thought the texture would be good for how I work with charcoal. I wanted to try something without ink, all grey scale in graphite and charcoal, and I wanted it to be a finished piece, not something I would tweak later in the computer. Something frameable.

But that caused my innate fear of failure to bring a halt to it after I got only a third of the way through it. The computer has turned into something of a crutch over time, and it’s why I don’t use media I can’t easily erase and redraw over. Some of the most amazing political art I’ve seen employed Conte Crayon or grease pencil and once you put something down with one of those that’s it, unless you’re working for publication and can get away with white gauche correction like Herblock did (you should see his originals…they’re full of that…but it didn’t show up in the halftone newsprint process so he knew what he could get away with). One of the grand masters of the form, David Low, once said that every cartoon he did took three days to complete, two spent in labor, and one “removing the appearance of labor.” I have tried over the years to take heart in that. Instead I’ve felt badly all the time about not getting over my fear of making a mistake on the drawing and learning to use those old techniques of the masters. This was going to be an attempt at making a start on that and I choked.

So I put it aside, but somewhere I could see it every time I went down into my art room. I needed it to remind me.

Somehow, the other day, something clicked and I could see a way forward with it, and I got a renewed interest in it coming from who knows where. Maybe it was something adjacent to my sudden interest in developing and scanning in some film that had been languishing for years. Maybe it was a willingness to visit its themes, which are full of so much joy and pain both after watching and reading so many new stories of young gay couples in love. But one day I took another look and I saw a way forward with it, and I put it back on my drafting table for the first time in years. I’ve been working on it in little baby steps for several days now and for the first time in years I’m feeling really good about where it’s going.

The work in progress is here at the end of this blog post, but be warned: It’s not pornography, I don’t do pornography, but it’s probably NSFW either. As I said, it doesn’t scan well but I can snap some shots of it off my iPhone. My intent though is there will only ever be one copy.

There’s a backstory.

Somewhere, possibly a Fark Photoshop contest, I came across an image of someone wearing bluejeans. But the image is tightly focused on just their hips…bare skin above the beltline and these tight fitting blue jeans below…with a product tag hanging off one of the belt loops. The tag reads:

WARNING: Removing this article of clothing guarantees the wearer a portion of your soul.

Most of us, except for low life creeps, know how that works. You lay down with someone and afterward they will be somewhere deep in your soul forever, for better or worse, but hopefully for the better. I thought the image was cute in its way and I made a print and stuck it on the wall behind the art room bar.

Time passes, the universe expands, and one day my brother came for a visit to Casa del Garrett East. While he was here he wanted to go to the local Harley-Davidson dealers to get a t-shirt from each with their locality on it, because collecting those is a Harley thing. So we went to the dealer off RT 40 near White Flint and while he was browsing around so was I.

Time was I really wanted a Sportster, so I was gawking at some of those. Then I walked over to where they had their fashion selection. Leather jackets and various Harley branded items. Over in the t-shirt section where the usual motorcycle culture prints, including one kinda rude one I’d seen many times before…

Gas, Grass, or Ass. Nobody Rides For Free.

And looking at that t-shirt I remembered the image behind the bar back home and thought: there’s two sides to that coin isn’t there.

And immediately an image came to mind.

A young guy is camped camped on the side of a dirt backroad somewhere in the middle of nowhere. It’s somewhere deep in the empty wide open spaces of the American southwest. The road he’s camped beside goes in a straight line and vanishes somewhere over the distant horizon. His motorcycle is nearby, and also his empty sleeping bag and camp stove. The young man stands looking to the sunrise in the far horizon with his morning cup of coffee in one hand, and the other resting on his naked hip; he’s only wearing a t-shirt since he’s just got himself awake and hasn’t dressed yet. His back is to the viewer, his t-shirt drapes suggestively just above his very cute butt. On the back of his t-shirt is a message that reads: Nobody Rides For Free.

This came fully formed to mind in that moment I saw the t-shirt there at the Harley dealer. The only change I made to it when I set down to draw it was initially he had a companion with him who was still asleep in his sleeping bag. But the more I thought about it I decided that, no, he’s alone on his road trip to somewhere.

At first you might think it’s just an effort in sexy art. Which it is, but there’s more to it I hope the viewer sees. It’s not just about whatever struggles he’s having in the romance department (because he wouldn’t be wearing that t-shirt if things had been easy for him), it’s about he’s looking ahead to the life he wants to find…somewhere, somehow, over that horizon. Desire and dreams. Life as a road trip. Nobody rides for free.

It’s interesting how the artistic process works in your head. Or mine anyway. I have such a vivid imagination that I rarely do preliminary drawings and roughs. I think it until I can see in my mind exactly how I want it to look before I start drawing. I do make tweaks once I start, but they’re very few.

So it was really important to me that I get this one right. It had to be my best ever, and deep down inside I don’t see myself as being that good. But I work on it because there’s no other way. I have to get it out of me. And this one says just about everything I’ve ever wanted to say in my art paintings and drawings…if not my art photography, which is just relentlessly bleak (unless I get to work with a model which I haven’t in decades (are you out there Robbie? I bet you’re still beautiful…thanks for nothing Jon and Joe…)). My other art is a lot more positive. This includes A Coming Out Story. The political cartoons are what they are.

So here is the work in progress. Please be kind…it is nowhere near finished, but hopefully you can see where it’s going. Some of this is cropped because of how I had to capture it in the iPhone, so there is more to it on the sides than you see here. There’s probably still months of work ahead because I’m doing this in baby steps. I may post more updates as I go along.

Something seems to be reawakening inside of me. Hopefully it stays away for a while. I feel so much better today than I have in a long time.

I am so easy to manipulate once you have the key. Oh I can come off as a stubborn single minded I Don’t Care What You Think so and so, yes. Also The Brat can be provoked out of me given certain specific events. Just ask a certain German someone. But once someone has that key I can be talked out of or into practically anything.

Obviously I guard that key carefully. It’s why I will often just walk away from a situation I don’t want to be in, rather than talk it out and get dragged back into somewhere I don’t want to be, especially if it’s someone I like, or did like at some point. It’s very easy for me to brush off angry people. It’s super easy for me to take a walk from someone who questions my intelligence after I’ve already taken the measure of theirs and found it wanting. But if you have that key it’s nearly impossible for me to keep my mind made up about anything you don’t want me to keep it made up about.

So just a few days ago I got a shock at work, and that on top of all the changes to the work environment which had to be made for security reasons (the arms race in cyber space between the good guys and the bad never lets up and we have an active mission going on) made me determined to go back into retirement. I was in tears. A bit of software I’d created that I was intensely proud of got snatched out from me with no notice. I was simply cut out of it. That, and the constant security roadblocks I was colliding with trying to do the work I was tasked with, was too much for me. I’m 71 years old and too old for the stress and heartbreak. I had not come back out of retirement for all of this. I told them I was retiring. Again.

The short version of the story is I got talked out of it.

I’m easy.

I’m hoping we’ve all arrived at an understanding that I’m just keeping an open mind. I have not committed to staying. We will, hopefully, work though things and see if the solutions proposed are agreeable to me after all.

But I have my doubts. There is more to me than the computer nerd/software engineer, but all of it centers on the fact that I am (yes I know it sounds pretentious to say so) an artist. I bring that to everything I do creatively. If the work isn’t worth giving my heart to, then it’s not worth doing. You only get one life and let me reach back into the religion of my childhood and say (I mean this) that it’s a sin to allow yourself to do work without heart. It’s like sex without love. Okay…yes…I realize there are people who are fine with that as long as the money is good. I am not. It’s why for most of my young adult life I bopped from one job to another to another. Once my heart stopped being in it, I was tendering my resignation. Although sometimes I got the boot before that when my sexual orientation became an issue. Which I was fine with because I don’t want to be anywhere people like me are held in contempt either.

There is art I have brought to my work that I must continue to be able to bring to it if I am to stay long term. In the short term, there is a Very Important project I am committed to bringing forth, a proof of concept, and I am going to do that however the f*ck I have to, because I agree it is Very Important and I am Going to get it done.

After that…

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

Edgar Allan Poe

I got a notice the other day that Harlan Ellison’s Last Dangerous Visions was finally being published. So I just now ordered a copy. I kinda figured it would take his dying before Last was ever published. It’ll be interesting to see their take on why he never got it out.

It was originally announced for publication in 1973. Over the decades, like the Flying Dutchman, Last Dangerous Visions had become a legendary ghost book. Sightings would occasionally be reported but eventually all were found to be mirages. This lead to more than perpetual fan disappointment. The writers who submitted to this collection did so on the basis of how fantastic the previous two were, and they gave Ellison their best stories…never to be seen again due to the contract they signed preventing them from publishing elsewhere before Last Dangerous Visions was published. Ellison eventually, so I’m told, released some of them from that contract after decades, but it created a lot of bad feelings. Not that Ellison was ever afraid of creating bad feelings. But some of those writers have since died.

I have the first two volumes and I’m really interested to read what’s in this one. Finally. But even more so to understand what the hell happened.

I should add to this, something I posted on Facebook that I neglected to post here after Ellison passed away, about why I like the works of Harlan Ellison, “controversial” and infuriating though he could be. This is the closing narration from the Twilight Zone version of Paladin Of The Lost Hour, a story that’s also part of his Angry Candy short story collection. It is a story he said, capped his preoccupation with themes of friendship, ethics, courage, responsibility, and the gaining of wisdom.

“Like a wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we were, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment. A blessing of the 18th Egyptian dynasty: ‘God be between you and harm in all the empty places you walk.'”

That could pass for a good epitaph for Harlan Ellison. Yes I’m quite sure he earned much of the anger directed at him in his life, but also the love. None of us are of a single weave of thread. And those of us who have walked in those empty places knew after we’d read him, that we were not alone. He walked there with more bravery and clarity than most of us could bear, so we could find our way. He could stare down Nietzsche’s abyss, and the abyss would blink first.

I have been called “a piece of work.” Perhaps. But there’s another word for it. It’s a word that feels really pretentious to call myself. But I am an artist. Given what Stephan Fry said even so…

Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it. That is your punishment. But if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
— Stephen Fry

This is truth. So maybe artist is just one of the verbs I go by. But notice all the verbs he goes by are arts. I am an artist, and not simply because I create art…

art·ist / noun

a person who produces paintings or drawings as a profession or hobby.

a person who practices any of the various creative arts, such as a sculptor, novelist, poet, or filmmaker.

I would add something to this. Something about you produce art so you don’t go crazy. Something about you do it because you have that inner compulsion to do it and you can’t not do it. Vincent van Gogh so I’m told, once said he painted so he wouldn’t go mad. I know that feeling even if not to the degree he felt it. And to that I would also add that you have that need to get it out of you, whether or not you have an audience. You would do it if you were alone on a desert island. You would do it alone on a desert island if you did not have any of your artist’s tools, because you would make tools out of whatever you found on that island.

This is me. There was a time when I became so depressed at seeing what was coming out of me…my second attempt at finding love failed miserably because I’d crushed on a straight guy…that I stopped completely because I just didn’t want to deal with my feelings anymore. But it’s not so easy. You can’t stop yourself…

One way or another it comes out. I was doing volunteer work for a gay BBS and while creating login scripts and programs to help out with some of the work I’d signed up for, I discovered there was beauty in the relentless machine logic of computer code, and it was a kind of beauty that didn’t get into my broken heart feelings. It was mostly a left brain enchantment, all logic and elegance of form. I dove into it. And that led to a well paying career as a software engineer that I worked for just over thirty years before retiring. Then, part way through that I stumbled onto the Hopkins student fair grounds while they were setting up the rides and something inside me reawakened, and I got out my camera again after nearly a decade. I rediscovered my other art media…painting, drawing, cartooning. I am a graphic artist, mostly. For a while I felt whole again.

Maybe being a bit older by then allowed me to work with my feelings and make art again. Also, I was part way into strike three and it had not yet come undone, so there was a new allotment of hope there. Now I’m 70 and at a crossroads feeling hopeless again and not wanting to do art anymore because I hurt so much inside. But I know I will eventually.

So this is the essential thing to know about me, noun or verb: I am an artist.

And the thing about that is, if you have a thin skin, we really can’t be friends.

Because I’ll either piss you off or weird you out. I won’t mean to, I won’t want to, but it’s like that scene in the movie The Adam Project, where Big Adam played by Ryan Reynolds asks his younger self (it’s a time travel movie) played to perfection by Walter Scobell, “Do you ever have a thought and not let it come out your mouth?” I’m 70 years old now and I’m only just getting the hang of that. It mostly goes into my artwork, but sometimes it does just come out of my mouth or it’s something I do or something I’m wearing or something I’ve done with my hair that you just think is weird.

I am an artist. I will occasionally say and do some very weird shit. I’m pretty solidly Chaotic Good on the chart, but that’s my tribe.

I am not the sort of person who provokes for the sake of provoking. To make me deliberately insult someone they have to really Really get on my nerves and even then I’m more likely to just walk away. I was raised by a single divorced Baptist mother and there is a lot of morality baggage that comes with that, some of which I still very much appreciate and live by, some of which I still struggle with (I really should have learned to dance). But though I might initially appear to you as some sort of middle class quiet kind of guy, not very adventurous, not given to extremes (except for that long hair), I am an artist. I will occasionally say and do some very weird shit. Not that I think it was weird when I said or did it. If anything I might have thought you would appreciate it. 

If that is going to bother or offend you then maybe just keep your distance. Even if I am sending signals that I’d like to get closer. No…especially if. 

We tend to wear our hearts on our sleeves (if you’re any sort of regular reader of this life blog you know what I’m talking about here), and that makes them easy targets, even if you don’t really mean to stab. And the thing about that is we also wear the scars on our sleeves (have you been reading my blog?). Hell, we take them out and make art with them. Some of my best art is stuff I made from the scars. Nearly all of my art photography is off of some bleeding part of my heart. This is how we deal with the weight of our lives. Normal people just drink. Well…we do that too actually.

The fact is a thin skin does not pair well with an artist.

(This post is mostly for a certain lieber Deutscher. Yes I was talking to you. Mostly.)

I’ve said elsewhere here that I couldn’t make it professionally in the arts because I never had the kind of focus it take. Case in point: just a few days ago I was all about my art gallery, and now it’s pretty much back to the photography.

I have two routes I use for my morning walks, one of which is to zig-zag through the new “luxury” rowhouse development nearby, where the container factory used to be. That development has been a muse ever since they started building it. Today on my morning coffee walk, while going through one of the narrow alleyways between the rows, I saw the sort of slightly cloudy, sun streaked sky overhead I love to work with, and just then it was making that narrow alley look really interesting to my photographic eye.

I had to have that shot. But at that moment all I had was the iPhone. Olay…it can can do a good job with my art photography, I have lots of examples. So I snapped off an iPhone shot just to get it. Then I hightailed it back home and got the Petri out.

I see now I haven’t written about this here, but probably on my Facebook page and I was neglecting this blog. But some time ago I found a Petri FT for sale on one of the used camera sites, that looked to be in very good condition. So I bought it for its nostalgia value to me. The Petri was my first SLR camera, simple and affordable to teenage me, and it opened a new world to me artistically. Now I could precisely compose to the frame in the viewfinder, because now I’m looking through the same lens that will take the photo. It was what you see is what you get, and I could be as specific about composing a shot as I wanted to be. Plus, you could change lenses from wide angle to telephoto, and no matter what lens I had on it I was still seeing exactly when the film saw when the shutter opened. You just don’t get that with any other sort of camera.

When I first got the second hand Petri I ordered I took it to Ocean City New Jersey for an ultimate nostalgia trip. OC became one of my photographic muses back when I was a teenage boy, and it still is. Many of what I consider my best shots from that period were taken with the Petri. Back then I could not afford its native 28mm or 135mm lenses, so those were third party compatibles from Soligor and Vivitar. Now I can, and that is what I shoot with on that camera.

Last summer I took the Petri with me because, perhaps irrationally, I wanted that example of my first SLR camera to see and photograph the land of my birth. I bought it back home to Baltimore still loaded with some Tri-X Pan I’d taken to California with only a couple shots on it. So I had the roll to finish. It still had the 28mm Petri lens on it. I put a red filter on that and gave the camera a fresh battery. Fortune smiled on me and the sky was still pretty interesting when I got back to the rowhouse development and that narrow alleyway, and I finished the roll pretty quickly.

That makes 7 rolls of Tri-X I have waiting for me in the darkroom. I have another partial roll of Tri-X in the Canon F1N that also came back from California. I finish that and it’s an even eight which works out for the four reel tank I have. Still have three rolls of 120 NeoPan 100, three or four of 35mm NeoPan 100 out of the Leica, and five rolls of Agfa Copex to develop when I can mix up some H&W Control developer.

Obviously my inner compass has swung back to the cameras. So it goes…

I’m doing episode #36 of A Coming Out Story in a different style from the rest of the series…kinda like how I did it with the “Conversation With God” story arc, where I used a lot of grey tones instead of my usual cross-hatching.

There’s a panel I finished this morning of me walking across the railroad tracks behind what was the old Radio Shack building, and I did a bunch of stuff with it I’d never done before, and made up a lot of new tricks for accomplishing certain textures and such. The lighting is harsh because I’m walking into the setting sun, low on the horizon, and it really pops out in a way nothing else I’ve done on the story does. I wasn’t sure why I was spending so much time and effort on it other than the tracks were an important part of my life there and that was a shortcut to Congressional Plaza that I walked often that doesn’t exist anymore. I wanted to do a piece of my history justice.

But looking at the finished panel I think I see how it works in the story. There was a meaning there that must have been working on me subconsciously and it’s about what this episode is about, and actually the entire story. This is me stepping across a boundary that cut between my neighborhood and that of almost all my friends back then. The old kid from the other side of the tracks stereotype. I’m a gay teenager walking from one world into another. From denial to…I dunno…something else…something much Much better…but still pretty iffy given it was 1971.

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.

Film is not dead: Demand soars for vintage cameras in developing trend

After fading in popularity, film photography is seeing a major comeback fueled by younger generations and social media. NBC News’ Gadi Schwartz takes us inside the developing craze with a story shot entirely on film.

If this means my favorite films and papers are coming back…good. But I doubt that. There’s more expense to starting up production again than any of the manufacturers would probably want to bear. But I would produce way more silver prints if I could have my beloved Agfa Brovira back in all its grades.

I never left film, though I adopted and have used digital since the first user level cameras were marketed. Digital has a place in my workflow, especially when I’m a working photographer on a news event or a wedding (or a class reunion like a few weekends ago!). But my art photography is almost exclusively film, and that almost exclusively black & white. If the objection to film is it can’t be as precise a representation as digital can with the latest and greatest digital cameras, then what of black & white photography. What of 2D photography? What of still photography at all. Reality doesn’t stand still and it isn’t 2D and we perceive it in color. By that measure my Tri-X Pan images are pretty far removed from reality. Why do I hold onto it, especially since it’s a lot more work than digital? Because it works for my art.

Marshall McLuhan famously said the medium is the message. But Picasso said it better: Art is a lie that makes us see the truth.

Well…the artist’s truth.

Black & white film has always worked for me as an artist. It lends to the image exactly the right “tone” for the feeling I’m trying to get out. I know what I’m doing with it. Whether I do it well or not is another matter. But I know what I’m doing with it. There’s a lot of reasons why someone would enjoy working with film. For me it’s a need. I never stopped.

I’ve been noticing this resurgence in film photography for quite a while now, and waiting for it to fade away again. But it keeps getting stronger, if the prices of film cameras are any measure. Now if I can just have my Fuji Neopan 400, my Kodachrome and my Agfa Brovira back. Oh…and Pakosol. And H&W Control film and developer. And how about Kodak Panatomic X…

Because they bring a measure of unselfconscious joy and beauty into the world…and we can’t be having that.

I’ve written before about how many years ago Montgomery County allowed you to go read your school records…basically everything your teachers wrote about you for the other teachers and administrators to see. So I went and looked and there wasn’t much there I didn’t expect to see. But what did tickle me was my first grade teacher who Did Not like me or mom one little bit wrote that little Bruce “takes excessive interest in personal art projects.“

I had two art teachers who got me, and they encouraged me and that really helped a lot. But some teachers when they see the slightest hint of artistic interest have some sort of allergic reaction and do their damnedest to kill it in a kid. I suppose so they don’t have to see how stone cold and dead their soul is.

It can cut you like a knife, if the gift becomes the fire… 
-“Maniac”, Michael Sembello

This came across my Facebook page the other day: Excerpts of a letter Rudolf Nureyev wrote to the dance community about his own life as a dancer, while dying of AIDS. He’s writing about dance, but it’s how it is for anyone who pursues an art form.

I can see so much of my life in this. But I never had the one single passion. It’s always been a tug of war between modes I had to learn just to let the seasons come and go as they pleased. One day it’s the cameras calling me, other times it’s the drafting table. I can’t force one or the other. It just has to be what it is in the moment.

Sometimes I just want to walk alone with my thoughts and listen to the earth around me, or the city. N.C. Wyeth said to walk in the world and soak it all in, but don’t forget to squeeze it back out every now and then. Yes.

But I never had that maniacal single minded focus that gets you the spotlight. It doesn’t matter. Read this and you know without doubt that Nureyev would have danced had he never got the spotlight and that’s how it is.

We don’t always get to earn a living doing the thing. Very few get the spotlight. So it goes. You work in the fields because that’s life. You dance because your heart must.

It was the smell of my skin changing, it was getting ready before class, it was running away from school and after working in the fields with my dad because we were ten brothers, walking those two kilometers to dance school.

I would never have been a dancer, I couldn’t afford this dream, but I was there, with my shoes worn on my feet, with my body opening to music, with the breath taking me above the clouds. It was the sense I gave to my being, it was standing there and making my muscles words and poetry, it was the wind in my arms, it was the other guys like me that were there and maybe wouldn’t be dancers, but we swapped the sweat, silences, barely.

For thirteen years I studied and worked, no auditions, nothing, because I needed my arms to work in the fields. But I didn’t care: I learned to dance and dance because it was impossible for me not to do it, it was impossible for me to think I was elsewhere, not to feel the earth transforming under my feet, impossible not to get lost in music, impossible not not to get lost in music using my eyes to look in the mirror, to try new steps.

Everyday I woke up thinking about the moment I would put my feet inside my slippers and do everything by tasting that moment. And when I was there, with the smell of camphor, wood, tights, I was an eagle on the rooftop of the world, I was the poet among poets, I was everywhere and I was everything.

I remember a ballerina Elèna Vadislowa, rich family, well taken care of, beautiful. She wanted to dance as much as I did, but later I realized it wasn’t like that. She danced for all the auditions, for the end of the course show, for the teachers watching her, to pay tribute to her beauty.

Two years I prepared for the Djenko contest. The expectations were all about her. Two years she sacrificed part of her life. She didn’t win the contest. She stopped dancing, forever. She didn’t resist. That was the difference between me and her.

I used to dance because it was my creed, my need, my words that I didn’t speak, my struggle, my poverty, my crying. I used to dance because only there my being broke the limits of my social condition, my shyness, my shame. I used to dance and I was with the universe on my hands, and while I was at school, I was studying, arraising the fields at six am, my mind endured because it was drunk with my body capturing the air.

I was poor, and they paraded in front of me guys performing for pageants, they had new clothes, they made trips. I didn’t suffer from it, my suffering would have been stopping me from entering the hall and feeling my sweat coming out of the pores of my face. My suffering would have been not being there, not being there, surrounded by that poetry that only the sublimation of art can give. I was a painter, poet, sculptor.

The first dancer of the year-end show got hurt. I was the only one who knew every move because I sucked, quietly, every step. They made me wear his new, shiny clothes and dictated to me, after thirteen years, the responsibility to demonstrate. Nothing was different in those moments I danced on stage, I was like in the hall with my clothes off. I was and I used to perform, but it was dancing that I cared about.

The applause reached me far away. Behind the scenes, all I wanted was to take off the uncomfortable tights, but everyone’s compliments and I had to wait. My sleep wasn’t different from other nights. I had danced and whoever was watching me was just a cloud far away on the horizon.

From that moment my life changed, but not my passion and need to dance. I kept helping my dad in the fields even though my name was on everyone’s mouth. I became one of the brightest stars in dance.

Now I know I’m going to die, because this disease doesn’t forgive, and my body is trapped in a pram, blood doesn’t circulate, I lose weight. But the only thing that goes with me is my dance, my freedom to be.

I’m here, but I dance with my mind, fly beyond my words and my pain. I dance my being with the wealth I know I have and will follow me everywhere: that I have given myself the chance to exist above effort and have learned that if you experience tiredness and effort dancing…if we pity our bleeding feet, if we chase only the aim and don’t understand the full and unique pleasure of moving, we don’t understand the deep essence of life, where the meaning is in its becoming and not in appearing.

Every man should dance, for life. Not being a dancer, but dancing.

Who will never know the pleasure of walking into a hall with wooden bars and mirrors, who stops because they don’t get results, who always needs stimulus to love or live, hasn’t entered the depths of life, and will abandon every time life won’t give him what he wants.

It’s the law of love: you love because you feel the need to do it, not to get something or to be reciprocated, otherwise you’re destined for unhappiness.

I’m dying, and I thank God for giving me a body to dance so that I wouldn’t waste a moment of the wonderful gift of life.

Yesterday I joined up with some co-workers for an after hours get-together at a local place I hadn’t been too, largely because it’s a nitch brewery and I am not a beer person. In fact, every time I see one of those online things that asks, “What is something everyone loves that you can’t stand?” the first thing that pops to my mind is beer. But this place was easy to get to from Casa del Garrett and I was curious if they served food and snacks too (which they do…pizza mostly) and so I went. Luckily, they also served some very nice non-alcoholic boutique soda.

It went well until as often happens with this particular group of co-workers, mostly youngsters compared to approaching my 70s me, they began to ignore me whenever I attempted to contribute to the conversation. Not subtilly either. So I got up and left. This let’s just ignore weird old aging hippy Bruce effect from these particular co workers is a Big contributing reason why I’m retiring from Space Telescope at the end of this year.

But it happens in other context too, and for years I’ve just let it happen and blamed myself for being, at least in person, a boring old fart. But this time I looked at what was happening critically. They were drinking, and I was not, and what I saw was an older man, politely trying to hold up his end of the conversation, listening to what the others were saying (they all had interesting things to say, interesting perspectives coming from mostly younger folks some of which were new to living in Baltimore), and waiting my turn before speaking up. And what was happening is that one person in particular would just jump right in and start talking over me, and the rest would follow. 

I allowed this sort of thing to happen for ages…I’ve never been very socially confident to begin with. When you’re raised by two Baptist ladies, one of which hates your guts because you have your father’s face, you don’t enter adult life equipped with a whole lot in the way of social skills. Coming of age during a period when gay teenagers had to hide for their own safety added another layer to that. So whenever I get talked over, I usually just shut up.

One nice effect of growing old and finally admitting it is that you stop caring about a lot of things you used to. It becomes easier to shed baggage the closer you get to the end of the road. You finally start to see that you just don’t need to keep hanging around places don’t respect you. This time, I just got up and left. But I left with a dark cloud hanging over me.

Luckily, I’ve planned a quick trip with my cameras to somewhere else for the weekend. I’ll be boarding the train to Richmond soon, taking the F1N and the Leica and some film and a few filters. I’ve made reservations at the place near the old train station, where I was hanging out with my cameras last weekend, and discovered a fantastic restaurant/bar/cigar bar called Havana59. The entire area gave my cameras something to love and I expect having more time to explore it will do the same.

I’ll be alone with my camera. Somewhere I can be alone with my feelings, and I can hear myself thinking, and explore the world I see with my cameras, and get my feelings out of me, and I am not being silenced.

Surfing my blog archives from a particular time in my life, I came across this one that describes it abstractly, and yet perfectly. 

October 5, 2006… I can see there how it really hit me in a very deep place that hadn’t really been disturbed in a long, long time. There are negative connotations to the word “disturbed” that some of us, usually of the artistic persuasion, recognize aren’t necessarily the case. To be disturbed is usually not a good thing, but sometimes it is an illuminating thing. Revelations happen. Not always nice ones. But it grows you inside. Once you see that, then you find yourself pursuing it from time to time. And people think you’re nuts. And you don’t really care anymore. That day, I was disturbed. And it was amazing.