"100 Years of Rain" Original Song by Mike Hoffman AKA Arturo Bastard

Fanatics Reunion Show 2019

The StarTrip Band Performance Project

Mike Hoffman Patreon Page Intro Video

Millions of Zombies

...

The Year Love Got Drafted...

It's pretty irritating seeing the word "Love" in almost every ad, email subject line, TV commercial, billboard etc. these days, I feel it seriously cheapens the most precious Human attribute, hence this poem...

The Love Button

Love that folder?
Love our new "app"?
Love to go shopping
At the "Shop Now" command?
Love that ol' eBay
Love posts, pins and pics
Hardly any left
For all the people we'll miss
That are right here around us
Beside us, in fact
But those who'll co-opt that "Love"
Don't care about that
Sure, "like" turned to "love"
It wasn't strong enough
To make you dig in your pocket
Or push buttons on demand
Is that "Love" for a button
The same as the Family kind?
Or the one that you've cared about
Since the dawn of Time?
The ante was upped
Around 2015
The year Love got drafted
By the Powers that be
Don't let them take it away
Have your own say
'Coz Love belongs to People
Not Products and Profiteers
Okay?

Merry Christmas 2015...

I've released a newly-colored version of my Santa Claus comic, you can get your own softcover copy on  Amazon at The Jingle Book.

The magnificent new wraparound cover.

It's a new take on an old tale, the mythology of Santa Claus, hopefully relevant to our day and age.  Some say Santa's really just an invention of Corporate America, and there's probably some truth to that.  At the very least old "Saint Nick" got a little co-opted to make a buck.

Corporate re-structuring of Christmas is certainly at full thrust today, as a trip to any chain store like Target or Walmart will illustrate.  All the Big Boys are lined up there to deliver: Marvel, Nerf, Disney, etc. etc.  The dominance is so total that there's literally no room left for anything else.  No cracks at all; totally sewn-up,  and scientifically engineered to penetrate kids' heads.

A push-button prison.

The device or "toy" shown above is only a halfway measure to overtake natural development in a child.  Next are devices for intra-uterine use, so kids can get accustomed to pushing buttons while still in the womb.  Would you feel comfortable giving your child this gadget "at birth"?  If so, why?  To prepare them for "the workplace"?

Then there's the sheer expense, mainly the robotic "toys" that kids tire of in about two days but which cost families a sizeable chunk o' change.  I remember the robot dinosaurs from about ten years back, do you?  They're mainly forgotten in the landfills, but the profits definitely went to the Top.

You can't possibly be a good parent for less than $189.99

Lastly, we have the clear messages that corporate toys send to children.  Plenty of injuries are on record from kindergartens and elementary schools due to karate-chops inspired by Power Rangers, superheroes and violence-oriented toys.  I realize that most stories need some level of conflict to reach necessary conclusions, but in most cases I'd trust the opinions of an expert on children like Mister Rogers rather than corporations, Hollywood or the NRA.

Recommended for children age 3 and up.

It's not really complicated: showing violence as a solution presents violence as a solution. But discussing this subject publicly can naturally lead to some violent verbal arguments, harmless karate chops and nerf-shootings.

To a Student...

The following is excerpted from correspondence from my "Guru" Art instruction program.

People live in "Seasons" you know, and the phase where we try to conquer the world does eventually pass. Then we may look back on it all more clearly.

My own experience is similar because in the beginning you want to win the war, the victory, gain the adulation, respect, acknowledgement and all that.  It is, of course, ego.  So we want the best arsenal--or toolkit--to give us an advantage.  We collect books, swipe files, go to zoos with sketchpads, and fall asleep at night wrestling with sticky drawing problems, have dreams with Famous Artists in them.

And we may choose a "Master" artist to apprentice to. There's an inherent contradiction with admiring and emulating a "master artist" all the while trying to unseat and surpass him.  It's a little like killing your parents, and seems an insoluble dilemma.

But the real truth is what artists like Picasso and Chagall discovered, and that is there are no Master artists.   More truthful is that everyone is an artist, but they are limited by their beliefs. They are in fact that: Limiting Beliefs.  But they can be transcended.

Not to make little or light of how you feel at the moment, or make the solution look too easy, too obvious or too clear.

But Art can exist for many different reasons, it can come from "the Soul", dependent on your beliefs and experiences, or it can come from the Ego.  Children and Aborigines draw from their core selves, but we make the mistake of trying to do it from our egos and intellects.  Then we have to take it all the way and hopefully come out on the other side.

Another artist who is working from his Ego is not going to help you, in fact he is only going to beat you down.

I've had students who experience tremendous anxieties, fears of failure, and minds that race nonstop in a mad-dash attempt to conquer the problem--or climb the mountain, or whatever.  When you consider how technically difficult it all is it does get a little daunting.  But it all happens a step at a time.  Racing, getting ahead of oneself, can be self-sabotage.

It's frustrating to be going at maximum effort and then fail over and over again, so in a way the answer has got to be some sort of Zen-like understanding of one's self and one's Intentions, our inner programming.

Have you wondered why drawing figures engenders a constant "failure mode" for years and years, but a child can't possibly fail to create a picture they find pleasing and satisfying?  Is their picture "better" than ours, or the other way around?

Being an artist and trying to master complex skills like Drawing and Painting is like falling off a bike over and over again, so no wonder it is terrible for morale. But there are ways around it. 

You know my Monster drawing books say you're going to make mistakes and you should encourage them, after all you're drawing monsters? 

So making mistakes is actually a good process because we have to in order to learn.  There is no other way. Feet too big?  Head too small?  Change them next time around. 

You're always going be changing and evolving, your Art too, so there never really is "a destination" you arrive at. At any given time, you are where you're meant to be. When you look at a drawing from last year, or even last week, you know you've evolved since then.  And you know you'll do better next time, and after that, after that....

But pushing too hard in the wrong areas can severely choke off progress, but we "obsessive types" like to do that.  So we may need to take a break, back off and develop a deeper understanding of what's going on, our motivations, our hopes, and what we bring to it all from our background.

One of the main reasons The Artist gets killed in people is due to their parents lack of encouragement or outright criticism.  All our later acts in life get molded by these sorts of experiences.  My Dad hated comics with a passion, right up until I got my first paycheck for drawing them. 

But you can get other aspects of yourself badly bruised and they will profoundly affect your life's trajectory, even though The Folks might have totally approved of the Art Career.  Those old wounds, patterns, or whatever, can still dictate and "pilot the vehicle" so to speak.

But what you don't need is to believe you're somehow doing something wrong.

Shock of the You...

I knew a guy once who had a "cheek tear", this was way back in grade school, he'd gotten caught with a nail some kids has stuck into a baseball bat and were swinging around.  It must be strange to get stared at your whole life because of an injury or abnormality.

No limits on limits.

Nowadays, that guy would probably get lots of comments like "great makeup job!" especially around October.  I've recently seen the face tear thing even on women, and I'm sorry for being old-fashioned, but it bothers me a little.  Add to that the billions of gallons of fake blood every Halloween, I'm beginning to lose any understanding of what's happening.  Or maybe I can figure it out here. Should I try?

It's no mistake that we live in a World loaded with Suffering, pain is everywhere, and though sometimes it's nice and sunny there's always a duality at play.  With Art, the Shock of the New tends to make the Establishment react--so they'll reflexively dub any new movements "ugly".  The ARC folks claim all Modern Art in an ugly swindle.  What do you think?

 An ugly stain from the kitchen?

Today I leafed through the new issue of "Juxtapoz" while at the local grocery store, and I suppose I am the type of person that the younger breed of shock artists are after when they break out the blood, guts and negativity--notice I didn't say "ugly".  If rotting baby corpses on pitchforks get someone some attention, then you can be sure someone will do it.  It's probably already been done, probably in the Death Metal circles.

Check out the mag--it's all status-quo revolting.

I'm not arguing that Evil doesn't or shouldn't exist, or that Art shouldn't include Pain as a subject, but rather simply to state that negativity is easy.  If you roll in something dead and go to party, then you will get noticed.  But the other thing, the opposite, which might be called "upliftment", is certainly not easy, nor is it as corny as the nego-death crowd would like to have it.

Big-Eye puppy need face tear?

So people inevitably work out their inner conflicts, and if babies on meathooks help then so be it, but I for one can't see how.  It just seems to be cheap, fast gimmick to replace talent, imagination and hard work, and supply a quick fame-fix.  And trying to avoid criticism by saying it's all "just fake" is getting to be a tired excuse.  How about just fake Nazi Concentration camps?  People with anorexia could find work there. 

Shock is a poor replacement for Talent.

A Random Episode...

Jack had moved into the neighborhood a few years back and got along relatively well with his next-door neighbor Fred initially, but after a few months found himself becoming more and more irritated by little things, his mannerisms, their gardening methods, the timbre and volume of his voice, playing their radio outside, all these things and more got stored away in a little mental folder Jack was amassing.

That library was growing constantly and became a pretty huge collection right before "The Episode". Fred had borrowed some tools a few weeks prior, and Jack asked to have them back. The innocuous way Fred answered wouldn't have caused a second thought for most people, but whereas Jack's extensive Library of History was concerned is was rude, obnoxious, and mainly--it was arrogant. It may be often said that it takes one to recognize one, but Jack's library didn't contain that info yet.

 A reasonable facsimile of the hammer.

So Jack went to his garage, picked up a hammer, and entered Fred's back yard via the alleyway gate. The shouting argument that ensued wound up with Jack smacking Fred twice in the head with the hammer. His wife ran outside in shock as Fred's two kids stared in amazement from a window. Fred died of those head injuries a few hours later in the hospital. The local media had a field day.

At a point before sentencing, Jack was interviewed by a court Psychologist. He'd expressed shock, wonderment and guilt regarding his actions against Fred, but admitted that immediately after the murder he'd felt "just fine, very calm". It was only later, several days later, that the true impact of his deed settled in.

The witnesses' window.

Fred's surviving wife and children were devastated, to say the least. Jack was given 50 years, essentially a life sentence. No one could really understand why the killing had happened, but the official diagnosis of the Psychiatrist was that Jack was "Third-Degree Bi-Polar". To some, that's an adequate explanation.

Jack discovered that the prison was full of others just like himself, people with the very same diagnosis. Some called it 3D-BPD.

Addendum

In another timeline, a scientist developed a technique by which a triangulation of laser beams was used to stimulate inactive portions of the brain, thereby creating a more balanced mood and moderate behavior.  In this reality, however, people with such disorders as BPD may simply wind up incarcerated--period.

Mike Hoffman Video Blog "Vlog" Debut...

I've mainly stopped writing text entries for this Blog and switched to the no-typing version, like the "Vlog" episode #3 below. So now you can quickly & easily find out what I'm up to in "real time" over on my Youtube channel. But of course you can still comment here.

Abstract Demo by Mike Hoffman 2 Handed Sharpie Intuitive Graffiti

I do a fair bit of abstract drawing & painting these days, some with both hands simultaneously (like this demo) and others with only the left. Or, novel approaches like changing the hand grip to something awkward and unusual--a stabbing fist, for example.

It's surprising how this kick-starting of unused portions of your brain affects your "regular drawing" when you go back to the patterns you know well.  I mean, after a while, like many decades, your drawing ideas, conceptually, just flow out on automatic, without thinking.  That's good for some tasks, but it's not everything.

Some call drawing like this "Meditative", and considering how it reeducates your brain wiring that's quite appropriate.



Here's another demo, accelerated, showing how the drawing approach has changed from using the left hand and R/L techniques for a while.



And you don't really have to be an artist to try this sorta stuff, I encourage everyone to grab a couple of Sharpies (I use the giant chisel points) and give it a try. And please send your results to me and we'll share 'em!

Good Vibrations...

The other day I had a visit from a trans-dimensional being, you know, the kind from a higher vibratory plane? That sorta stuff happens all the time around here.  Don't think what you see is all that exists, it ain't.  But don't just take my word for it either, or else you'd technically be hallucinating.

 

A recent artwork inspired by a download from 5D.

Anyway, there we were chatting in the kitchen, and our cat walked by.  This visitor took one look and said "You'd better get that cat looked at, it's got a growth in its abdomen".  I wasn't surprised as "Tiggy" has been having trouble leaping around lately. Later, the vet verified it-- a tumor.

 

I had to pull the car over to receive this one.

If you think of Sound as a vibration, which it is, then imagine Sound increased in vibration a few million times, beyond the level of hearing, microwaves and all else, and you get LIGHT. Light is currently an absolute for our Science, the "speed limit" of the Universe, etc. etc.

But if you take Light and increase its vibration to a similar degree, then what do you get, kids?  You get CONSCIOUSNESS.

And now today--it's back again as a reminder.

This is why your consciousness inhabits multiple planes, timelines, past/future scenarios, etc., and why it seems intangible and is currently unmeasurable.

But don't take my word for it, that would be wrong.

I Miss Octavia...

I received the following communication in September 2011, concerning my first novel The Gemini Ring.

 There are hints in the book that the reality we are presented with may be other than normal, but we are experiencing it through Peters' point of view, and Peters is a rationalist. Is he experiencing premonition and transformation from life to afterlife? Is Octavia some mad Frankensteinian genius, a devotee of the transformative power of creation, ensnaring men in her seductive web? Is she some darkly angelic force of nature who ushers the doomed to their next incarnation? Does being one preclude being the other? In this story, I think, by being the former, she also acts in the role of the latter. Is she truly timeless? When she says that she has known Peters' father and grandfather, does she mean his direct progenitors, or is she referring to his "father" as all men who have come before? By how many names has she been known, and by how many men? I do not obsess over answers, I revel in the Mystery - it is a philosophy I have come to embrace over time. I got to the final page of THE GEMINI RING after a second reading and found my self halted in my tracks, once again. What I take from it is a sense of transformative freedom, all ego destroyed, and existence simplified. Anyhow, as I see it, by the end, Peters has traveled beyond the point of return, but he finds that he cannot continue on in the direction he has been going, so he relies upon Octavia and friends to choose what is best for him. And what is best for Peters, the most compassionate decision, is to release him from it all. He will never be one of them, and he cannot go back to who he once was. At least that is how I feel about it. The ending is beautiful, and that is not changed by whatever horrors may have led up to it, or whatever tragedies may lay behind it . If anything, that is what makes the final passage so powerful for me.
Once again, I enjoyed the book immensely as a fun, weird read, and I have never read anything quite like it. So, thanks again for writing it. I look forward reading THE ICE CAVES.

You can grab this very book right now on Amazon, in fact both novels are collected into one volume called Octavia: The Dream Chronicles.

NOTE:  When you order your copy from Amazon, please email me with your order info, as apparently their system is not reporting all sales, or royalties, to we authors.

New Mags in the Pipeline...

I'm developing several new publications at the moment, the above tryout cover is a sort of parasitic twin on Bloke's Terrible TOMB of Terror  called Mad Monster Cartoons.  Will it be an economic failure?  I sure hope so, that way I'll know I did good.

Super Clowns #1 an example of a fine artistic achievement & terrible seller.

Also planned is a sort of psychological/New Age Horror mag called Epitaph.  It's a place for stories too bizarre for TOMB, with subjects like Ghosts, Channeling, PSI, "The Shift" and so on.  If you don't know what The Shift is, I encourage you to look into it.  We is all shifting, boss.

 A unique home for The New Weird.

AND, Hoffman's hired a few folks to help out around the studio, so production will probably be increasing.  So what took me so long?  Too many hats!

Does the above magazine concept have a future?  Tell me about it HERE.

"Progress Report" New Blog...

I've done what I threatened to do, and that is start another Blog devoted strictly to showing my more offbeat  artwork.  It's live now with its first posting at hoffmanprogressreport.blogspot.com  I encourage you all to join up there publicly so I'll have an idea how much time & energy to devote to it.

In fact there's so much unseen artwork I intend to display there that I had to start way back at the beginning of 2013.

In the meantime, here's two seriously new projects due out soon...

 "Madame Tarantula Futurewest" collects all Madame Tarantula Comics to date plus some new material.

"Deep Space" is not only a gallery of recent ink drawings, but also offers technical instruction and custom perspective grids for artists.

Over and Out...

I was talking to someone about self-promotion the other day, and they said "Why don't you get a Blog?"  You guys know I have a Blog, but it's rarely for self-promotion.  The whole idea of self-promotion can get slippery fast.  And I have to wrestle with it almost all the time.

In a sense everyone's self-promoting in a way, but some are more guilty than others in how they do it.  Or maybe more importantly, the WHY they're doing it.  It's only a matter of degree between some huge celebrity on a magazine cover and a kid with three chords and a guitar and no audience-- it obviously feeds the Ego.  And that can easily become a dangerous habit, a loop, so sometimes all the rest of Reality sorta fades away.

You can now start your own publishing business without paying creators anything.

"Devil's Due Digital" is a company run by one Mark Thompson, who continued selling downloads of my comics after our contract expired in 2013.  He has worked hard to rip people off, like myself, and to earn an "F" rating with the Better Business Bureau for it.  Stay away from him, kids.

So I recently had to contact Amazon, Comixology, Barnes & Noble and a bunch of other venues and ask they remove all the stuff Thompson was selling.  And not paying me for, incidentally.  It took almost all afternoon one day, that I could've been using instead to madly promote myself.

I really don't want to fight with people, not anymore anyway, but this Devil's Due Digital thing was like someone literally robbing you.  And you can't sue Thompson, coz he's hiding all the time.  No one knows where he is, even Intelius can't find a decent address for him.

 A newly-reformatted music album by the Von Hoffman Orchestra.

On another note, many of you know of my "Monster University" properties, which began in 2002 or so.  There have been three full music albums, a half-hour cartoon, plus some comics, prints, and other merch. The songs are some of the best work I've ever done, I think.  It's sold steadily for years, especially around Halloween.  Remember?  Remember?

Well, nowadays you can Google "Monster University" and none of that stuff appears.  I mean NONE OF IT.  All you get is Pixar's "Monsters University".  And the boat slowly sinks under the waves.

Nowadays a green circle can be a character.

Now, I'm not saying they ripped off my idea, but think about my side of it.  What if it were you? 

Never mind that there's also a Japanese "Squid Girl" cartoon on in America now, after I went and created one waayy back in 2001.  Mine is called "Squid Girl" too.  Another amazing coincidence.

 The two Squid Girls meet.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I'm pretty tired of the whole "entertainment" thing.  And it's not just that I'm not richer or more famous.  I want to create things and have freedom to do so, but I can't wear all the hats.  I don't know why I thought I ever could.

So rather than talk to you all, I could just can it and start another Blog just for "promotion".

The Beauty Standard...

I've made quite a few notes recently about topics I want to write about here, but I confess I'm falling behind.  I know folks are reading these entries, but of course it's a job to write them and I don't really get much back except tons of glory.

One such topic is my new theory concerning Standards of Beauty.  We all think we know what "beauty" is, personally, but also our culture tries to tell us what's beautiful, too.  Trying to nail it down actually can be confusing.  But I'm not so confused anymore.

Did you know that in parts of China, enormous ears on women are considered the apex of beauty? I can't even get a handle on that.  Pardon the joke.

Or it could be foot-binding, tribal scarring, breast implants, neck-rings, lip-plates, tattoos or you name it.  Then there are the Actions of Beauty, which in our culture can mean doing your best imitation of an object. Or if you're here in Wisconsin, using the word "like"  multiple times in every sentence.  That is like, so, like, attractive.

 A random Money-Honey picked from the hat of today's Fashion.

So everything is beautiful, and it really is, even all the karmic blemishes and societal pock-marks of collective Humanity, but I also think we need to be really, really careful and observant about who's trying to decide these things for us.  After all, there's big, big money in Beauty.

Your Beauty could launch a thousand ships, for example.  You could have a pyramid built in your honor.  You might get paid six figures or more to be a model or actress that fits the weird genetic roulette beauty ideal thingie we have now.  Men could actually be beautiful. It could all get confusing fast, and scary too, but never fear, you have Hoffy here to bail you out.

Another prisoner of an aesthetic.

Basically, part 1 of the Theory is this:  Beauty is everywhere and omnipresent, in a flower, a sunset, a cracked pavement block, a Downs Syndrome child's smiling face, and even the hideous scarring that occurs at your friendly local plastic surgeon's office as you seek answers to the aesthetic issues that drive your mysterious life.  Beauty is blue baby barf, or your lips locking onto a damp cigarette butt you picked up off the street.

Part 2 says that in the hierarchy of power, the force of money drives domination.   So, your homespun, quirky and likely unfashionable concepts of Beauty mean nothing without adequate funding.  As a spectator to all this, you are continually devalued, even as an object, your basic humanity unrecognized and therefore nonexistent.

And with any value that equates to money, the system must be rigged, and it is, towards scarcity.  We already apply the idea of scarcity to precious metals, like gold, and to diamonds and other rarities.  In fact, whole nations economies' are backed up & based on these "rarities".  But you can't eat or breathe gold, and diamonds ain't bringing grandma back either.

Worried? Keep your valuables inside another valuable.

So in the current Beauty market, there must be SCARCITY.  "Average"-looking people on streetcorners simply can't qualify.  They have no backers.  Forget that little kids' feelings get totally tromped on during this whole process, that little girls are flooding and verily overflowing shrinks' offices today, infected with serious body-perception issues they've picked up--somewhere.  Push that from your mind.

This is why the most popular (re: highly paid) actresses today look like some sort of bony giraffe/human genetic hybrid.  It's a little freakish.  But that is how it works: again, SCARCITY.  Beauty must be RARE at all costs.  If it were really common as dirt (which it is) our whole system would collapse.

But that's coming, too.

I'd add that while assembling a few images to illustrate this entry, I Googled "Beauty" and "Cosmetic Mutilation".  Either one is apt to completely creep you out.  Even worse, the line between them gets blurry fast.

How do we un-explain all this to our children?

Taro Mochi Snacktime...

In case some of you imagine that all I do is complain, find fault, cause injuries and then pour acid into the wounds, here is a hot 'n' fuzzy experience I'd like to share gleaned from a trip to the local Asian grocery store.  That's Asian, not Oriental, to you other acid-pourers out there.

No matter how attractive the packaging, don't eat it.

The sheer visual noise of aisle upon aisle of crass labeling and a million words of barely comprehensible Engrish was suddenly stilled by the serene beauty of the image above; a box of desert snacks.

As a collector of Color Palettes, when I spot an unusual or unique arrangement of hues I make a note, or scan, and catalog it.  When I began doing this, I learned a lot about I could apply to using color in Painting. I found, for example, that different eras seem to have their own peculiar color schemes.  The 1970s naturally springs to mind, deep browns, oranges and creams on Supergraphics, or the 1960's Leroy Neiman and Peter Max.  Who are our colorists today?

Getting back the package above, make no mistake, it was designed by someone with an artist's eye.  Probably, they will go on to become a painter, after they complete their time at the corporate grindstone.  I hope so. This package was only one of a series of "flavors", but this one stood out.

A digital Palette spawned by the exquisite Taro Mochi packaging currently on trial.

A Google image search's contribution to a "visually similar" picture; colors, yes, shapes, no.

When using an image search, I found that an uncommon amount of material from foreign websites appeared.  In this case, it's an example of our language limiting us from a more global experience.  I had no idea just how deeply the Japanese are into the "online" experience.

Below is one of my recent "channeled" Symbolist paintings called Vibrational Portal, which I also launched an image search with.  I typically create these types of pieces without much forethought, then wind up decoding them afterwards.  The shapes and patterns follow a symbolic logic much like Australian aboriginal art, and the have "flows" in directional axes in linear time and multi-dimensionality.  This one, for example, has a clear X/Y axis.

A recent 20"x24" acrylic painting with metallic gold. 

So when searching for visually similar images to this, I found far less "people" examples, like the Taro image that yielded almost nothing but, and much more artworks and interiors.

Search result with more of a shape/color balance.

Next I inverted the colors, basically created a negative image in Photoshop, and repeated the search.  I do all this to save you the time and trouble, and to discover whether technology really has any sincere intuition so that its random chaos actually jigsaws into our experience in a helpful way, but of course it doesn't. It's like getting your palm read by Robbie the Robot.

At your marks, get set...

Again, the results were largely foreign, and probably due to the stricter geometry involved, shape and color were equally represented.

Sometimes there are fruitful surprises "looking" at things through a computer's "senses", but for the most part I think it tells more about the infrastructure of the technology than really relevant similarities.

I suppose the most charm the process could exhibit is the initial sensation of surprise upon seeing relationships hovering outside the sphere of our own personal/emotional makeups, but that gets old pretty fast.  Rather than a smooth, continuous effect of directional motion like a roller coaster,  it's more like 45-degree angle turns in a UFO.

But if you try it too, then you can be the judge.

ADDENDUM...

Here's a couple more relevant images:

Warm & earthy Supergraphic from the 1970s.

From the color dictatorship at the Pantone Company.