Random Erik

Sometimes I can be, well, stubborn. Once upon a time I won a bar bet involving 10 pound dumbbells. Why there were ten pound dumbbells in the bar and who brought them I’m still a bit unclear on. I think we were making fun of the guy who had them, which is what led to the bet.

Simply stated, it was an endurance thing: Hold your arm straight out with the elbow locked, dumbbell in your fist, and see who can stand it the longest. After a minute, it started to hurt. One of the guys dropped out. Two minutes, and another dropout, leaving two of us. Three minutes and my arm was starting to burn. Four minutes and I wanted to give up. But I wasn’t going to give. The stubborn thing had kicked in. The other guy gave at 5 minutes. I held it beyond him for a slow, painful and utterly pointless count of 20. An “in your face,” I guess. The sad thing is, I think the prize for winning was not having to buy the next round. Oh yeah, a prize up there with winning the lottery, oh yeah.

This all came back up this week. Our gym announced “Hell Week”, a contest involving taking the most classes over the period of a week. Cycling courses, running courses, abs workouts, kickboxing, yoga, pilates and more fun of that variety. Something in my brain twisted. I was gonna do it. Not only that, I was gonna win. I worked out the maximum number of courses I could take, planned a strategy and steeled myself for the ordeal.

Okay, day 1 started badly. A 6 a.m. cycling class, the first class of the contest, went on without me. I couldn’t sleep the night before, and when the time rolled around, I really needed to stay in bed. That’s okay, I made the noon cycling and was still off to a strong start. Pilates that evening was great, as was an X-Factor class (lots of running in odd ways) and an abs class (15 minutes of actual hell).

Friday started at 6:30, cycling again. I hurried home, walked the dog, and went back for Hatha Flow Yoga. Here’s where things started to go South. We started by sitting cross-legged, our eyes closed, and had a… reading. An odd reading about finding your guru and some story about a woman who’s kid got locked in a hotel room. She decided to lie on the floor and touch his fingers through the gap beneath the door rather than doing the sensible thing and getting the hotel staff to just open the damn door. The moral was pretty muddy, and ended with the line “it’s not enough, and yet it is”. The kind of nonsensical hippy crap that I can’t bear, especially after living among hippies during and after college. I wanted to scream “It is or it isn’t: that kind of statement is just spiritual and intellectual laziness!”. I held my tongue.

I should have held my breath. As we started the actual workout, someone in the room began emitting a strong, sulfurous stream of gasses. And I found it hard to hold plank, as an elbow injury earlier in the year still isn’t completely healed. As the instructor started quickly calling out yoga terms without acknowledging any beginners who didn’t know what she was talking about, and as another jet of flatulence became apparent, I fled the room. I’ve got nothing against Yoga, but this teacher had obviously eaten too much granola.

Still, I managed three classes that day. Today, I intended to do three as well. I’ve done zero. Tomorrow, I’ll probably do one, maybe two, or maybe even zero.

The stubborness has slipped. A serious session of self-examination took its place. Why was I doing this? Very few people seemed to be competing, so I felt I had a strong chance if I kept up the pace. But I was a bit sore, and I realized that this contest would require most of my time for several days to come. I honestly wanted to go to the farmer’s market with Maggie and Storm (the lovely and perfect Golden Retriever) instead of pushing my body to its limits. I wanted to stop obsessing about schedules and endurance. So I let go.

Why had I wanted to do this?

Partly, I think, because I was never athletic as a kid and was always teased about my lack of ability in gym class. Now that I’m older, I’m more active than most of my peers. Was it time for another “in your face”, perhaps?

Partly because I’m feeling really down about myself. I’ve had trouble looking in the mirror lately: My idea of what I look like and the face in the mirror are too different. A recent “Good Lord, I’m ugly” episode left me shaken by its intensity. Maybe I could get that muscular stomach to make up for my face?

And partly (and maybe mostly) because I felt the need to be part of something. Something to pull me from the sense of isolation that’s been growing for a while now. Fitting in has never been something that’s come easily to me. Too geeky for the average person, to “normal” for the geeks. Shy about calling people up to do things. That sort of thing. Going to all the classes, proving myself the strongest, seeing the other contestants regularly… it seemed like a connection.

But I knew it wasn’t, not really. After the contest was over, there would be no real continuity to the achievement. This morning, it all started to feel empty. I’m glad that I’ve achieved what I have, but continuing at my initial level of intensity no longer makes sense, at least not to me.

I’m still going to some classes, I’m still going to attend the party at the end of the week and see if I get a small consolation prize. But there’s not going to be a stubborn “in your face.” I’ll settle for a drink and an evening of socializing in the company of my wife. Maybe it’s not enough, but it is enough… oh forget it, even after all this, I can’t swallow that. Instead, I’ll let you know how it all ends.

When exactly did my love for Japanese entertainment begin? I’ve thought about that a lot this year, as I’ve worked on comics and felt the influence of Manga in general (and Osamu Tezuka in particular) on my art. And as I taught Drawing for Japanese Animation to teenagers. And as I travelled to Dallas to attend A-Kon to talk with other artists and geek out in the movie rooms. And as I watched my Netflix queue fill up with Anime.

Anyway, I’ve thought about it a lot this year.

Last week I began working on a comics story for a class I’m taking, and decided to go with an old folktale. I remembered the story of The Magic Teakettle from a book of Japanese folktales, a book that I read when quite young and if memory serves belonged to my brother. There was an image of a half-teakettle/half-badger dancing on a tightrope while holding a parasol and waving a fan (perhaps the first openly gay character in my literary experience). I loved that story. An early exposure to a Japanese tale, and one that I remember pretty clearly even now. I looked up the story on the Web to clarify a few points, but it was mostly there in my head already. But I studiously avoided trying to find that picture. I want to do something that’s my own.

But I think my affinity for Japanese pop culture probably originates with after-school television circa 1973. We’d just returned from Germany, where the only television I watched was the Porky Pig show. So when I discovered a white lion cub with black-tipped ears and a catchy theme tune, it was love. Kimba the White Lion, created by seminal Manga and Anime artist Osamu Tezuka, had me hooked with its humor and adventure and heart. I watched Speed Racer, as well, but not with the fervent love I had for the little white lion (I don’t think he was albino, because he had blue eyes).

Warning, a little side note: Perhaps my distaste for the Lion King comes from how blatantly Disney ripped off the show. I won’t try to convince you here, just check this out and decide for yourself. Oh, and there was that Simpson’s joke where a lion appears in the sky to say “I’m proud of you Kimba… I mean, Simba…”. Side note complete.

There was a long period where I paid little attention to Anime and Manga. I had no time for Battle of the Planets, Voltron or the other giant robot stuff of my teenage years (though I did watch Ultraman during the Kimba period). Friends recommended a few Anime films: Ninja Scroll and Vampire Hunter D (the first Vampire Hunter D) are ones I remember watching and not caring for at all. Some of you are gasping at the sacrilege, some of you have never heard of them. But I also discovered the good stuff: Cowboy Bebop, Full Metal Alchemist, Metropolis, and the films of Miyazaki. Check ‘em out, you just might thank me.

Now that I’m drawing again, after a long break in my 20s and early 30s, I find that I’m heavily influenced by Anime. I love the freedom of design over realism, I love the deceptive simplicity, I love the feeling of fun in much of the style. I’m not really drawing in the Anime style, but my style wouldn’t be the same without my heavy exposure to the stuff.

The first drawing I remember doing, and I mean sitting down and really wanting to draw something specific, was Kimba the White Lion. That damn Kimba, as my mother once called him. He was there in the beginning. And it’s nice to look at my latest work and see that he’s still hanging around.

We are truly living in a Golden Age. An age of miracle and wonders. An age of enlightenment and artistic achievement. And I realized it tonight while drinking wine and eating chocolate (oops, “Chocolat”) cake at the Alamo Drafthouse. Lord how I do love Austin.

The Alamo has been doing Saturday morning cartoons every Monday night, a buck to get in or five dollars more for unlimited breakfast cereal. I skipped the cereal: I’m too concerned about fiber content in my cereal now that I’m old, and not even nostalgia will get me eating Lucky Charms, Cookie Crisp or Trix (silly middle-aged guy, Trix are for…). So with a glass of wine in my hand and a big piece of cake for afters, I sat down for a themed show of “spooky” Saturday morning TV from my childhood.

My heavens but the stuff I watched as a kid was bad. Though the shows listed writers, I couldn’t imagine anyone actually creating a script for some of this. The list of animators for each show was very long, and I can only imagine that it was because the individual animators didn’t last for more than a day each, since a brain-damaged marmoset could have turned out most of the work I was seeing. The humor came down to aping whatever adult shows were currently popular (I picked up on Laugh-In and Get Smart as common themes). And the ghosts were still pretty much crooks with the poorly thought-out idea that drawing attention to yourself as a supernatural freak show will scare people away and allow you to get on with your nefarious deeds.

I was very surprised to see that Goober and the Ghost Chasers, a show I remember as being better than average, was particularly bad. Why does the dog turn invisible? I don’t remember. Why does the good looking guy disappear with the attractive girl while the schlub and the dog have most of the adventures? Hmmmmm. Why are the Partridge Family kids involved? Especially Danny? To get a likeness, the Partridge’s are always shown face on, which was the creepiest part of the whole evening.

I don’t really remember the Drac Pack. Terrible, simply terrible. The vampire had Maxwell Smart’s nasal tone and joke book. Then there was a werewolf whose power is to blow big winds (I didn’t see any pigs lurking about) and a southern-accented Frankenstein’s Monster, who seemed to have no powers whatsoever. All led by Big D, who happens to be Count Dracula trying to improve the image of monsters by leading the kids remotely from his coffin.

The rest is a blur of bad animation, worse writing and even worse voice-acting. We watched this stuff? As I may have mentioned, I watch kid’s programming, a lot. And much of it is still truly terrible. Pokemon is an abomination before the Lord, I know. But the current crop puts what I saw tonight to shame: Stuff like Fairly Oddparents, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Spongebob, Kids Next Door and especially The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. I mean, if parents and Right-wing watchdogs understood some of the references in Billy and Mandy, Cartoon Network would be off the air and it’s staff in the stockade. For a kiddie show, it takes as many risks as the Family Guy, and can be every bit as funny to boot. When a cartoon little girl quotes Aleister Crowley, you know you’re in some strange waters.

So we are in a Golden Age of kids programming. We may remember fondly those Saturday morning cartoons of yore, through that gossamer haze of nostalgia and sugar-induced comas. But frankly, they stunk. As an adult, you can enjoy, even laugh out loud at, some of the current crop. Kids today. They don’t know how good they’ve got it.

It’s so wonderful to see things you never think twice about through the wide-eyed innocence of someone experiencing things for the first time. The laughter, the bright eyes, the derisive laughter… ah, good times. Yep, I’m referring to living with a foreigner from a primitive and culture free country like Great Britain. A country without a stately and refined tradition like our own Mrs. America.

Yep, Maggie channel-surfed into the Mrs. America contest tonight. I knew I was in for something interesting when she called out “I’ve found something dreadful to watch!”. Really, my first thought was that she’d hit something on the Sci-Fi Channel. Maggie does hate science fiction, but I quickly decided that a bit of Star Trek wouldn’t really merit an announcement. We had Mrs. America… another example of American weirdness that gives Maggie so much fodder for stand-up comedy and general snarkiness.

“How long has this been going on?”, she wanted to know. I guessed the 70s. A quick Google search confirmed a 1977 debut for this institution. I felt oddly proud that I’d guessed this correctly. Yep, I just knew that something like Mrs. America was a product of that worst of all decades. It was a time when people still cared enough to protest the Miss America pageant as degrading to women, instead of simply forgetting that it still exists, like we do today. Some bright spark of that earth-toned era decided that married women also deserved their chance to be judged like pigs at a state fair. (A side thought: Wouldn’t it make a great story for a woman to enter the contest under the threat of death if she didn’t win… and with the help of a brilliant and sympathetic spider and her barnyard friends, go on to become famous? Or has something like that been done?).

Anyway, Maggie is appalled but unable to look away. We’ve been watching, and it’s freaking hilarious. There’s a fashion show featuring outfits representing each State. Who knew Georgia was the poultry capital of the world? I didn’t, until a woman dressed as an egg wandered down the runway. Mrs. New York came out as a Big Apple, which strikes me as a fantastic way to hide massive hips. Mrs. Maine dressed as an honest-to-God moose, albeit a moose wearing a brown one-piece bathing suit and furry boots. My biggest disappointment was that Mrs. Utah didn’t dress as 8 women, representing the illustrious tradition of polygamy. Oh well, maybe next year (another side note: Maggie wanted that joke but I wouldn’t give it to her).

The whole thing seemed to be presented by Trimspa, who gave an award to the woman with the most compelling weight loss story (Mrs. New York, who probably won for shedding that dumpy apple outfit). Yep, nothing says beauty pageant like unhealthy weight-loss products.

Sadly, once the swimsuit competition began and the cheesy jokes from the presenters kicked in (one appears to be Omarosa from The Apprentice, actually saying “you’re fired” to the surprise of no one), things simply got mundane. So we’ve turned it off and are off for the boring married early-to-bed Saturday night.

The Family Guy once declared the Lifetime Network “Television for Idiots.” This was on the WE Network. Watch your back, Lifetime, you’ve got some serious competition.

I’m really into animation, I’m sure a lot of you know that. And I work on the computer all day, and have a TV DVR built into the Mac. So I watch cartoons. Spongebob. The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. And I like Kim Possible (digging those Stephen Silver character designs, you can see his touch in Danny Phantom as well).

Anyway, this means that I’m getting stuck watching ads aimed at kids. There are several travesties to report to those who love music (I mean love it, not just put it on in the background and not particularly care what it is). I love music, as much as cartoons. I listen to iTunes when there are no good cartoons on… but I digress.

Travesty 1: Kidz Bop Take some current hits and get copycat, sound-alike singers to rerecord them. Then get a bunch of kids (oops, Kidz) to sing along. Not using any harmony or nothing. Just a bunch of kids singing along. I’m sure most parents have experienced this sort of thing while driving the mini-van around. I’m unsure as to why anyone would pay for a cd of this. I’m even more unsure of why kids (oops, kidz) would want it. I believe that such a thing would have struck myself and my peers as the pinnacle of uncoolness when we were the target age.

Travesty 2: Hillary Duff She’s not pretty, she can’t act and her singing is the least of her not-inconsiderable lack of talents. Why is Disney trying to make her into a pop star? And why are young girls falling for it? I’m assuming that not all of them have IQs of 80 and lower. And you guys who are college-age or older and like looking at pictures of her: “Creeeeeeppppy…”.

Travesty 3: Worship Jamz Think Kidz Bop with Christian music. All of what I’ve said previously applies. Also, having heard lots of ads on cable TV for Christian music albums, it sounds as if there have been only 8 or 9 Christian music songs written. It’s always the same ones, even after a couple of years. And the comment on The Simpsons about Christian musicians going secular was spot on: “All you have to do is change the word Jesus to Baby”. The lyric “Every move I make I make for you, you make me move, Jesus” is a case in point. Try it. And speaking of The Simpsons, maybe the target audience is Rod and Todd Flanders. I’m sure Ned wouldn’t buy it, though, not with that suspicious Z lurking in the title.

Travesty 4: The Final Straw Today, I saw a video by Bowling for Soup. I don’t know much about the band, but the name is stupid enough to be fun. They’ve covered the Modern English classic “Melt With You”, made famous in the film Valley Girl. It was so ubiquitous, it was nicknamed the Stairway to Heaven of the New Wave movement. I have a fond spot in my heart for the song: “Moving forward, using all my breath; Making love to you was never second best”. So imagine my surprise to hear Bowling for Soup singing “…Being friends with you was never second best.” I know the country is swing swing swinging to the right, but how much more infantilized are we going to become? Are they going to rework Like a Virgin (a song I hate, but still) as “Like a young girl, being friends for the very first time”?

Stand up now! Get angry! Support musicians who aren’t giving in to corporate pressure and actually doing what they want to do. Me, I’m listening to The Clash and missing Joe Strummer. God knows we need him now.