Post Haste

 Sometimes I have a pen, a moment of downtime and am within close proximity to a stack of Post-It® notes. This afternoon was one such instance. 

I regret nothing.

Little Richard

Howdy

Some days I'm just wasting ink and paper.

Consider Worms

Sketchbook Therapy

Sometimes, when life's little downturns and inconveniences have me irritated, I find the best therapy is to whip out the old sketchbook and pencil and start to doodle the stress away. Conversely, when I'm sitting there staring at a blank sketchbook page, pencil impotently clutched in hand, that aforementioned irritation compounds like guinea pig poop.

Last night my television stopped working. Boo-hoo! you might chide. First world problems! you may sarcastically sneer. Yeah, I get it. It ain't exactly the end of the world. But I generally watch one  television program on one station, and I don't have cable. So when 7pm Central Standard Time rolls around this Saturday, and I flick the idiot box on to immerse my troubles in MeTV's Svengoolie, and see that my digital antennae has suddenly stopped functioning, I get a little chafed. Yes, I checked to see if it was plugged in, before you ask.

Well it turns out the channels needed to be rescanned or some nonsense, but for the night my television was out of order. After a good fifteen minutes of glaring at the thing like I might be able to magically fix it or cause it to explode with childish vengeance simply by glowering at it, I decide that that's maybe not the healthiest or most productive way to spend a Saturday night. So's I whip out the little pocket sketchbook and the mechanical pencil and I start to doodle; as a result I come up with this scribble about how the world might change if cats had pyrokinesis.

Doodle Doodle Doo

Yeah, I'm back with more Doodle-A-Day cards. Two more drawings of two of my favorite things: robots and dinosaurs.

Character Study

I’ve been doodling this guy in various forms over the last couple of days. Just some nerdy little guy who can fit all kinds of requirements in visual expression. Like having his face torn off or making a meek point of order.

La momia enmascarada

Some more sketchbook filler. Inspired by precode comics, The Wild Wild West and other zany pulp western adventure television and movies, and, well, the bizarre blender that is my brain.

Burgerhosen

Here’s some sketchbook nonsense from this evening.

Happy Halloween!

It was a pleasantly low-key Hallow's Eve here in the Secret Basement Laboratory. I made some baking powder biscuits, tried to calm my animals with each chime of the doorbell, and watched two Halloween-themed episodes of The Andy Griffith Show: "The Haunted House" (Season 4, Episode 2, from October 7th, 1963; also the episode that formed the foundation of The Ghost And Mr. Chicken when Don Knotts left the show to start his film career), and "Three Wishes For Opie" (Season 5, Episode 14, from December 21st, 1964). In the former Opie loses a baseball in The Old Rimshaw House and Barney, Gomer and Andy go in to retrieve it. The house appears to be haunted, but in fact is a front for moonshiners. The latter finds Barney with a fortune telling kit that has an eerily high batting average with granting wishes via the power of Count Ivan Teleky! (Even if some of them are based on misunderstandings.)

And while I was watching, I drew this guy!

I'm all about the simple pleasures.

Yes, in case you were wondering, I am a seventy-year-old in a thirty-seven-year-old's body. I believe someone once described me as "an old soul", which, in the parlance of the kids means that I'm a real square. A real L-7, daddy-o! 

Kong Goes Surfing

Here's another Doodle-A-Day card from yesterday.

A Night In The Cemetery

One of the amazing things that I've gotten to do over the last few years (this was the fourth, I believe) that falls into the category of "I can't believe I get to experience this!" but somehow had the good fortune to be a part of, is the Trylon Cinema and The Friends of the Cemetery "Cinema In The Cemetery" event. Over the last four Septembers I've gotten to sit in Minneapolis's oldest cemetery, the Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery on Cedar Avenue, and watch old horror films screened on a small screen erected directly in front of the caretaker's cottage. If you had told monster movie-obsessed child-me that I'd get to sit and watch Vincent Price in The Last Man On Earth or Hammer Films' Dracula in a cemetery, I'd have thought you were either bonkers or trying to sell me a line. 

Not only did that happen, but twice–during the first year, watching El Santo And Blue Demon Against The Monsters, and the following year during Dracula, of all things–the scene was complete with a full, blood-red harvest moon!

This year the program was a little different. The Trylon usually creates a theme, and runs one film per Saturday along that theme for the month of September. One year it was all Hammer Films productions; last year was a month of Vincent Price films, etcetera. This year there was only one outing scheduled, for whatever reason, and it was a showing of the 1924 silent classic The Hands Of Orlac, directed by Robert Wiene and starring Conrad Veidt as the titular Orlac. Being a silent film, of course, the music was crucial, and this was supplied not by pre-recorded soundtrack, but by a live ensemble called Spider Hospital. You can hear a piece of the music here.

I took my sketchbook along and did some doodling during the brief period of waning daylight before the show started. I didn't get much on paper before it was too dark to see, but that's fine. I was there to watch the movie, and the movie was great. The only irksome thing cantankerous old me finds with these outdoor screenings, is the crowd is often a mixed bag. Some old folks who remember the films and have remained fans, some film buffs out to catch a classic in an unique environment, and those who've shown up for a novel experience–usually families looking for something to do besides sit around the house and ask what there is to do. I generally have my Svengoolie shirt on at these things (solidarity is important) and usually get one or two middle-aged guys who point at the glow-in-the-dark design and say "That's what I'd be watching if I wasn't here tonight." 

Some sketches of headstones.

I'm no puritan when it comes to the film viewing experience; unless there's someone gabbing on their cell phone during the picture, or standing in front of the screen, everyone's allowed to have a good time watching a movie. But I've found these things have a tendency to turn into amateur Mystery Science Theater 3000 events. Yes, films from the beginning or middle of the last century have elements that don't translate well to people who don't have the context or reverence for the material that I or other fans of the films might have. Especially when the film is a silent film. Of course there's no dialogue for the actors to utilize to help convey emotion or context, so they have to over emphasize body language and facial expression. Every concerned character becomes a wide-eyed, chest-clutching basket case on the  verge of a nervous breakdown, every swooning lover becomes a creepily melodramatic, bewildered caricature. It looks goofy to the CGI generations and that's understandable, but to constantly lambast and heckle the material and performances as if we were sitting around at the Internet Cat Video Festival gets a bit irritating after a while. Same goes for the guy sitting next to me who spent nearly all of the ninety-two minute running time scrolling through his various social media streams on his cell phone. Apparently the comments he was receiving in response to the comments he made on some picture of something was more riveting than what he'd paid $10 to experience.

I don't know why there aren't more events scheduled this month. Hopefully disgraceful acts like this won't prevent future screenings.