Posts Tagged ‘San Francisco’
8 items.
In the book, this comic is meant to be a bookend to the comic I did a while ago where I show my life in a pie chart and Rickets says I should go ahead and kill myself. Obviously this one is meant to be a little tongue in cheek because the things on that list aren’t the only reasons I don’t kill myself, but when I was brainstorming things about life that I really like, or things that I look forward too, that’s a pretty good sampling of things that came to mind. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a problem that sometimes it seems like the most important things in life are art and sex, but I don’t really think that that’s a cynical way too look at it at all, because sex is about relationships, and about connecting with other people, and art is about expression, and hopefully about communication, so they’re both really about the ways that we connect with other people, and I think that’s why I like using them as the two main themes of my work. Art is the way you take the things that are in your head and try to put them out into the world, and relationships are the way we try to let other people in. Maybe the fact that I’ve had more success with art than with relationships means that I’m better at expressing than receiving, or maybe it just means I’ve dated a bunch of dickheads.
Either way, I always like to remind myself that I can do better at art, and I think that no matter how good you get at something you should always strive to be better, and I think that, in the marginal success I’ve had with relationships, I just need to keep reminding myself that I can be better about letting people in. In these comics, trying to strike the balance between those things is the journey that most of my characters are hopefully on.
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This was more or less how the conversation went, with some sort of ambiguous non-answer, but eventually I decided that he was as confused about himself as his confusion was confusing to me, so there’s that.
This comic was a mess for a while there, and if you saw the original you’d see it all covered with white paint that I used to fix some mistakes, and I had to touch up a lettering mistake digitally, too. But actually, I feel good about the fact that I’ve been doing more fixing to my drawings recently, because part of the reason is that I’ve been getting a little bolder. Before I wouldn’t have as many mistakes to fix because I wasn’t trying to draw as many different things, and I’ve also started to feel more free to experiment and to fix what doesn’t work after. Of course, I’d probably feel a little more impressed with myself if I hadn’t also broken a nib, splattering ink on part of this one, and also drug my hand through wet ink more than once.
The conversation that starts here and is gonna continue over the next couple of strips actually did happen this way, in Jack Kerouac alley, but I didn’t really plan it to happen there all that much. We were shopping at City Lights, and it seemed like the right time to talk about some things. It was kinda bubbling up in me for most of that afternoon. As far as presenting in the comics the conversation where it actually happened, it worked for me because it fit in with running themes that have been going through all of these strips for a while now. I really like drawing in Vesuvio, and I had already taken the boy from Santa Cruz there with me before so he could drink absinthe and listen to be ramble on about Arthur Rimbaud. One of the things I did like about us dating, though, was that we could spend hours in bookstores, talking about Caravaggio or flipping through art monographs, whatever, and that’s valuable. I look back nostalgically sometimes on one relationship that was actually a pretty horrible one, because he liked comics a lot and we could go to shops and browse forever and show things to each other.
There are a few comics and drawings throughout the archives on here that were drawn in Vesuvio, and probably more than a few mentions of Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan. There are also little things in the buildings I chose to draw in this strip that are meant to connect with things in comics that I’m planning but haven’t done or posted yet, so this strips to me is meant to kind of tie a lot of things together. The main little joke that might kind of need an explanation is that between the second and third panels, the characters actually go through a bit of a time warp, because in the third panel they’re standing in front of the door as it looks in that picture of Ginsberg and Dylan from the sixties, whereas today I believe that area of the alley is actually covered with a big mural. I decided I’d rather draw the door as it was in the picture rather than as it exists today, and that somehow sorta makes sense to me. The first two panels are much more based on how the area looks these days. I’ve started to get more into firmly setting my comics in their environment, whereas before the backgrounds used to be maybe more impressionistic sometimes. I really like taking pictures of places to use in the comics, and my comic that’s gonna be in an upcoming anthology about the San Francisco Mission District was a really fun experiment for me with that.
Next strip will be posted on Thursday or Friday, since it’s gonna be a fairly large one, and I doubt I’ll be able to finish drawing it by Wednesday. Otherwise, I’m mostly been sticking to a Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday schedule for posts, so check back.
Just a quick sketchbook page for today. I have a billion drawings like this, because this is basically what comes out when I’m standing around with nothing in particular to draw. I bring my sketchbook to bars and public places a lot, for different reasons. One of the obvious reasons for bringing it to a bar, of course, is that I can go there and hang out until something happens without just standing on the wall and staring at people all creeper-status. Although, I’ve been known to do that too. The sketchbook-in-bar thing is also good because if somebody wants to approach me, it gives them an easy excuse for conversation. The problem with that is that it’s sometimes a little too easy, and some pretty gross old men have thought they had an in with me if they’d pretend to care about what I was sketching. I have trouble striking the perfect balance between aloof and available.
Most people don’t seem to think it’s strange to see someone drawing in a bar, and some people even seem to think it’s cool, but occasionally I do get somebody who just thinks it’s freakish to see a fellow patron with something in his hand besides a drink or a crotch. I was standing in a bar, I think the same one where I drew this sketch, and some guy comes up and starts talking to me, mostly about himself. He was cute, though, and offering drinks so I feigned interest. He talked about how much money he made, and how much he liked it in LA, where apparently he was from, but explained that he came to San Francisco about once a month to, “unwind.”
“But it never turns out that way, haha,” he said. ” I always think I’m just gonna relax up here, but next thing I know, I’m doing coke offa some guy’s cock!” Yeah, don’t you hate it when that happens? I wish guys would just keep their coke and their cocks to themselves, for chrissakes. “What are you doing with the book?” he asked.
“Sketching.”
He gave me a look a little bit like I had said I was using it to beat stray dogs. “Dude, that’s weird.”
“Why’s it weird?”
“Cause you’re coming to a social place to be anti-social!” he tells me.
“How am I anti-social when I’m talking to your right now?”
His brow furrows, I can sense the wheels turning a bit behind frustrated, blank, but awfully cute eyes… “Whatever, dude. I’m meeting a friend at Lookout. Wanna come?”
I do go to Lookout, but I meet up with another friend and stop talking to the guy, which seems OK by him because his friend has a couple of other friends, and I think the group of them are deciding to get friendly.
A month or two later, I ran into the guy again and am surprised that he remembers me. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “You’re that guy who reads!”
“Um, well, yeah, I read, but I wasn’t that night. It was a sketchbook.”
“Yeah, right, right, you had a book! In a bar!”
I’m starting to feel a little bit like Belle talking to Gaston as the guy puts his arm around my shoulder and introduces me to his passel of of cute 20-somethings; different 20-somethings than last time, of course. “Hey everybody! This is my friend who reads!”
Some sets of bleary eyes wandered in my direction for a minute, I waved and then excused myself. I was feeling like I didn’t really belong there, somehow. I was the guy who reads! I guess that’s what I get for hanging out with somebody from LA, right?
Here we go. Page one of the story I’ve been talking about. I’ll post more commentary on it as it goes, but for now I think I’ll let it remain a little mysterious. I will say, though, that I liked the reaction it received when I read it at Space Galley on Polk. The first read-through went fine, but the crowd was a little bit smaller, mostly just the other artists.
After we finished, the venue decided to bring in some people to liven the place up, I don’t know if it was some sort of rent-a-crowd or what, but this group of 20-ish 20-somethings all poured in at about the same time, so the bar was much busier and Dylan thought it would be a good idea if we started the readings again. Drunk as I was, I thought it just might be a good idea, too. It wasn’t. They asked us to stop part way through my sencond reading of the story because, they said, it was interfering with the music they were playing. OK then.
My roommate, Ignacio, was upset that they told us to stop, so he decided to flip ahead to one of the most pornographic panels in this story (And there are lots to choose from, if you’d like a little tease about where this particular misadventure is headed) and he left it up there, projected on the wall about six feet tall, bright on a white wall in a dark room. I had no idea what was up there until I started hearing some or the random guys around me muttering.
“What the fuck is that?” “The fuck?!” And so on.
A few of them really seemed like they were starting to get pissed by the time I went up there and changed the panel. So, there you go, I have the ability to offend people at a relatively trendy San Francisco bar in a pretty young, progressive neighborhood. I take that as a pretty big compliment.
So, as the caption indicates, I did this sketch for a friend named Marshall. One of the first places I discovered up here was Vesuvio Cafe across from City Lights Bookstore, and everything about it made me feel compelled to draw, write, be there. City Lights is the bookstore that originally published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and it’s still an amazing bookstore today. Across the street, amongst strip clubs and restaurants and eclectic housing, is a business that designates itself The Beat Museum. You can buy T-Shirts with a picture of Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan standing together in a doorway that’s visible from the tables on the second floor of Vesuvio, near where I drew that picture of myself. Vesuvio has pictures of Kerouac, Neal Cassady, all those guys, hanging on the walls, and most of them allegedly hung out and wrote there. I think it recently celebrated its 60th anniversary.
Downstairs, they sell absinthe, melt sugar and pour it through the slotted spoon and the whole bit. The absinthe makes me think of Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, what they would have been doing if they had been there, what they would think of me and that hat and sweater I’m rockin’ in that picture. The picture of Dylan and Ginsberg makes me wonder what Rimbaud would have made of Dylan, an admitted fan of his. What would Woody Guthrie have made of Paul Verlaine? I like to imagine that, in this cafe of my imagined poetical pantheon, Rimbaud would have found his way onto Neal Cassady’s lap. If we’re all there, he would be welcome on my lap too, of course.
The first time I came to Vesuvio, I immediately felt a rush of heady electricity, imagining all these connections and permutations rushing backwards through time and forward to Broadway and Columbus today, and hopefully forward further into the future, if those who can do there best to make sure it does. My first night that I wandered in there, I hadn’t brought a sketchbook with me, but I knew that I had to draw something, or write something, and I knew that if I had a pen in my hand something would come out of it, so I ran to the nearest store I could find, which happened to be a Walgreen’s, they’re everywhere up here, and I ran (literally) back, to the alley where that Kerouac quote at the top of the drawing is written in the ground, near the Ginsberg-Dylan door, and I wrote it down in the notebook. Of course, after spending a little more time in Vesuvio I noticed that on a lot of nights it’s overtaken by annoying twenty-something guys talking loudly to impress the vague, confused, and too-buzzed twenty-something girls they’re trying to fuck, will fuck if they can just get them a little more buzzed so they aren’t sure any longer whether loud, assertive men remind them of their inclination to rebel against their fathers or their inclination to seek their approval. Those people are a lot more interested in the titty bars than in the psychic residual permutations of William Burroughs. They’re not everybody, though, and the bar is still one of many places that make me profoundly grateful to live in this city where so many things have happened, and walk streets that Hitchcock and R. Crumb have walked.
A while after doing this sketch and sending it to Marshall, I was in Cinch, a bar on Polk where I seem to enjoy getting blindingly drunk a lot of Fridays, and I was stopped by an older man who pointed at my sketchbook. I try to carry my sketchbook with me as much as possible when I go out, I never know when I’m gonna need it, and it also serves to give guys who might want to talk to me an easy excuse. I couldn’t understand what the older man was saying, so I leaned in close to hear him. He was wearing a scarf and a hat, and so was I.
“Do you do poetry?” He asked me.
“Some,” I say. “I write. Comics, different things.”
“Do you like poetry?”
“Sure,” I say. He asks my favorite poets. I don’t really know that much about poetry, so I name the obvious ones, most of whom I mentioned above. When I get to Ginsberg, he smiles and taps my arm. “I knew Ginsberg, ” he says.
“Seriously?” I don’t know if I believe him or not, but I’m interested.
“Can I see your sketchbook?”
I open it for him. I get to the sketch above, and the man becomes visibly excited.
“Kerouac!” he says, pointing to the quote. “People your age, they seem to know Kerouac now.”
“Did you know him?”
“I talked to him once,” the man says, “but I don’t really remember about what.”
The fact that he’s admitting that he doesn’t remember rather than making something up makes me more inclined to believe him.
I ask him to tell me more about Ginsberg, and he starts to tell me about a reading he went to where Ginsberg and another poet took apart a piano with a hatchet. He tells me about a love-in in Golden Gate Park, with people openly selling acid and other Beat poets reading. He tells me about being in a cafe one afternoon, maybe 10 blocks from where we were, and Ginsberg coming in and asking them to listen to him read something he was working on. It was an early draft of Howl.
“The things that were happening in this city then, the ’50′s and ’60′s, people you’re age feel like they’re relevant now?”
I tell him that the more I explore art, poetry, music, comics, prose, all of it, a lot of my interests seem to go back and revolve around those times. He nods and says that he feels like it’s coming back, that whatever cycles we travel in are coming back around to those times. I feel like we’re saying the same things from two sides, because it’s something that I’ve been grappling with recently. Politically, culturally, artistically, there’s a sense that something needs to be done and a relevance to idealism that seems to be an echo of other historical crash-and-burns. Maybe it’s Obama.
“What are you here for?” the man asks me.
I was in the bar to get laid, but I took it he meant San Francisco in general rather than the Cinch specifically. “I don’t know,” I say. “I just felt like it was where I was supposed to be.”
“You know,” he said. He put his hand on my chest and smiled at me. “You just need to find out.”
I stared at him, a little drunk and confused, not quite knowing what to say to that. What do you say to that? But somehow, it seemed completely real. In a movie, you probably would have shifted in your seat or maybe rolled your eyes. But I thought I knew when he was referring to, even if, like always, I can’t quite be sure I wasn’t confusing knowing with hoping.
Shit like that never happened in Riverside.
And here’s another one of those guy sketches. The general plan at the moment is to post a few more odds and ends like this for the next week or so, and then to start in with a longer storyline to be posted in installments. So stick around!
Here we go. This first post is a sketchbook page I did last year, and I don’t think it requires much explanation about what it is or why it’s here. I’ll take a few minutes, though, to explain my general intentions for this website. Such as they are thus far. My hope is to have the posts be a mixture of short strips, sketchbook pages, portraits, longer comic stories posted in installments, and maybe even prose or poetry pieces that are meant to accompany them. The more economical description of that would be, “I’m gonna post whatever I feel like posting.” The idea behind it, though, is hopefully a little more ambitious. It might not be apparent right at first, but most of these first short pieces I have in mind are intended for inclusion in a series of longer collections I’d like to eventually complete. I think that the interesting part of this, short of the potential for an entertaining train wreck, will be to see these story lines as they’re formed, and to take the short pieces that (hopefully) stand on their own, and gradually figure out more about how they fit together. Then again, some of them aren’t going to be part of any grand plan, and a lot of it I’ll be making up as I go along. Maybe that’ll be entertaining, too.
How will you know when to check back and see new comics, you ask? “I mustn’t miss a single delightful installment!” you exclaim? Posts will be, for the forseeable future and as often as I can possibly make myself adhere to my own guidelines, added three times a week: on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
