Archive for July, 2009
14 items.
Alright, I think I’ve given people enough time to guess the correct answer to the first, “What substance was I on?” game, and nobody has yet, so in answer I’m posting this other sketchbook page that I think was done on the same night.
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So, for some reason I feel like sharing this story. The other day I was on my lunchbreak and in Subway, getting a sandwich. When I walked in, there was this skinny little twink of a guy, maybe about twenty years old and with a twenty-two-inch waist on his chick jeans, his eyebrows were plucked nearly to oblivion, etc. So, of course I was looking. I kind of watched to see if he was there with people, and he went back to sit down at a table with these two guys who looked to be in their mid-forties, went to the gym way too much, and all that. At this point I’m thinking, “Good for them,” maybe I should ask the older guys for tips on picking up guys or something. After a few minutes they get up, and the blond older guy, as they walk toward the door, has his hands all over the little guy’s back and butt, pulling up his t-shirt and revealing the star tattoos on his lower back, placed symmetrically sort of like they were meant as guide marks for where to place your thumbs when you’re slamming him against your crotch. They walk outside together, and as I leave are standing on the street corner smoking. As I pass, the little guy stretches his arms up and reveals his tummy, at which point he also reveals the top of what he’s wearing underneath the chick jeans: a diaper. That’s right, they had him in a diaper. I kind of did a double take, because at first I just saw some sort of white material poking out and I thought maybe he was wearing lacy panties or something along those lines, but nope, it was a diaper.
That’s all for today.
Not being of a young, attractive boy I’m into or of my cute cartoon characters, this picture is something of an anomaly in my sketchbook. Even more so because I’m fairly happy with it a couple of days after having drawn it. Yup. I was waiting for a friend in a reception area in the office where he works, and I drew this from the cover of a book they had on their table. I’m trying to find a balance between drawing fast, (This was done without penciling) and drawing detailed, which I feel makes my type of drawing stand on its own without color and have some weight.
Is it really so much to ask?
I think commenting on this much might be counterproductive, but I will give a warning: finding pictures of children praying as I drew this led to a truly stomach-churning tour of what Christians seem to consider cute and wholesome that I don’t recommend anyone else embark upon.
Don’t you hate it when another artist manages to tell your own life story better than you probably ever could? I saw 500 Days of Summer yesterday, and it’s basically the story of me and one of the guys I went out with recently. Making it all the more awkward was the fact that I happened to be seeing it with that guy, the two of us having chosen the movie basically because of the cast and commercials or whatever, and not really knowing what it was about beforehand. Early in the movie, my friend (We’re friends now) started laughing at some of the comments made by the main character and whispered that he reminded him of me a lot. By the time that the character was talking to the girl he was seeing in the film about how he wanted a title, and she was hesitant about the two of them being official and he was playing it off like he agreed with her and didn’t care, I was thinking that I should send the filmmakers a letter demanding royalties, because I remember very distinctly having written that dialog in conversation with the guy I was sitting next to, just a few months ago. I think the only scene in the movie that I haven’t experienced in some way yet is probably the last one, where he meets a new girl named Autumn, (The previous girl having been named Summer, hence the title of the movie) and we’re meant to believe that she is in fact his soul mate, or they were meant to get together, or something like that.
I go back and forth with myself about whether I am still expecting that last scene to play itself out for me but I do, in between my phases of whorishness, consider myself to be a romantic at heart. Anyway, It was a better movie than I expected and one of very few heterosexual romantic comedies that I’ve really felt an identification with. There are bits in a lot of Woody Allen movies that I can link up to scenes in my own personal drama, and I’m told (By an ex boyfriend who got very quiet and sullen upon watching the film with me), that I bear a strong resemblance to John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity. I’ve seen a lot of myself in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but that’s simply one of the best films ever made about relationships, and I think anybody who’s ever been broken up with and felt the experince very deeply will find that movie able to speak to them.
Sometimes I’m irritated with these things, sometimes not. Blood on the Tracks almost makes anybody writing about a breakup superfluous, because it says just about everything and says it better than you ever will. But I guess the point isn’t just to say it, but to say it in your own voice. To paraphrase Stanley Kubrick, every story’s been told, and it’s our job to tell it a little bit better. That’s intimidating too, though. It takes a lot of balls to say that you want to tell something better than Stanley Kubrick or Bob Dylan or Charlie Kaufman told it. So I’ll settle for the goal of telling it in my own way.
What all this has to do with the above picture is that I recently discovered the R. Crumb collection Gotta Have ‘Em, which is a compilation of his portraits and sketches of the women in his life. It’s arranged chronologically, and in the introduction he explains that he sees it as an autobiography of sorts, through his observations of the people in his life. The description struck me because, as people going to this website may have noticed, one of the things I’ve been working on recently is a collection of drawings of the guys that have played various roles in my life recently, and I’ve given a lot of thought to how these different series of comics and illustrations I’m doing can eventually be combined into a series of collections (The first one is planned to be called, Hot Mess) that would comprise a sort of, well, autobiography.
So, hey, should I be surprised that whatever I come up with, one of my heroes has probably already done something similar and grander? I guess it’s something you have to live with. Yep. But, like I was saying, I’ll just have to try to do it in my own way… And I’m pretty sure that R. Crumb wouldn’t really want to draw any of the boys that I’ve decided to draw, and if he did, I’m pretty sure that they wouldn’t evoke the same feelings for him that they do for me. None of them, afterall, have giant butts or bird heads. So, with that overlong explanation, I’ll link to the actual purposed of this post: a new galley of my boy portraits on comicspace.com/rickworley .
Memo to old guys:Me being too polite to start screaming, “Rape!” in a crowded bar and being in a stationary position for a few minutes does not entitle you to conversation. Seriously. I like to do sketches like this just to keep my hand moving, more or less, and especially when I’m at bars alone. I haven’t done many in the past few months. For some reason, fate has conspired to keep me in the company of other guys during most of my recent visits to San Francisco’s dens of evening debauch… But I think a lot of the stories about those guy companions might make decent comix at some point, so I don’t want to shoot my wad with them just yet… In comix form… Get it? hahahahhahaha.. I shot my wad with the guys in non-comix form. Get it? yeah? Oh, right, it just wasn’t funny. Well, regardless, the above sketch is from last Saturday, when I decided that I needed a bar night by myself for a change, and made my lonesome way down to Castro. I was iffy on what I’d do, and whether I’d draw, and I was making it up as I went, so I didn’t bring a sketchbook or pens. As soon as I got there, though, a fairly cute brown-haired boy started checking me out, I liked the music (As much as I can in a Castro bar), and I decided tonight was gonna be a good, good night. So, I ran to the nearest Walgreens, which never seems more than two blocks away in this city, (Don’t get me wrong, I love this city with all my heart), and I grabbed the pad of paper that seemed like it would fit in my pocket.
As douche bag positioned himself next to me and started telling me he liked my drawings and wanted to know where I was from and what was I doing in Castro all by myself, (Must mean I wanna fuck old guys in red baseball caps with accents of vague European origins, right?) I tried to put the pad of paper back into my pocket and excuse myself but then discovered that it did not, in fact, fit. As a coyote in a trap’ll chew it’s foot off, I tore the paper out of the pad and folded the stack in half so that I could fit it in my back pocket, and I left. I hadn’t sat in my new position long when he arrived again. “Oh, you’re over here now. Haha. So, how do you like the city? It’s cold, yeah?” Haha. Anyway, I drew this cartoon as he was sitting next to me and thoughts of unsavory natures flooded my mind. Cute brown-haired guy left while douche bag was going on with stories of which I understood maybe every fifth word. Would anybody have blamed me?
I’m kinda surprised that they weren’t able to get a gun. But I guess disbelief will have to be suspended for the story to progress.
The burden of proof in the American justice system.
I very rarely do drawings like this of people from life; I usually use photographs instead. When I have done guys from life before, their reaction usually hasn’t been all that enthusiastic. This time, though, the guy in question liked the drawing a lot, and I have to say that it wasn’t the worst time I’ve ever had drawing somebody. What happened after might have even been more fun, but I guess there’s little or no artistic purpose to me elaborating on it in this post.
