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!

"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.

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?

Flycatcher Filmstrips...

Continuing the theme of the last entry, I'll be commenting on the 2009 film Mr. Nobody, which we watched last night with the whole family.  I know I'm old-fashioned, but I will probably never get used to the new trend in acting of keeping your mouth hanging open.  Maybe it's supposed to be "emotive".  When I see it, I can only imagine a director saying "No, no, no!  We've got to shoot it again, your mouth wasn't open."

 Good eyeballs can take you a long way in Hollywood.

A friend recommended this film, and looking it up I noticed it's described as "Science Fiction", though I thought I'd understood it was about parallel lives.  So, we'd find out for ourselves.

I thought Mr. Nobody had some things to recommend it; visually, parts were quite amazing, but that's apparently typical now. The dinosaur yawns before being put down.  Characters seemed to be cast more for their appearance than acting ability.  And considering it was a joint French/Belgian/German venture, it was as Hollywood-looking as all get-out. That must be Creeping Globalism.

A Hoffman abstraction showing whole worlds isolated from each other.

If I hadn't invested all that time in the 2.5 hour "Director's Cut" I might not be writing this now.  But, I feel I have to say it--basically scream it at the stars like some baying wolfhound of prehistory who's lost its mate-- that even though this thing portrays a high-tech future, parallel lives have nothing to do with Science Fiction, any more than Edgar freakin' Cayce is interchangeable with Richard "Grumpy" Dawkins.

Not to say that in some distant future our head-up-the-ass Science won't enlarge itself to include things like parallel timelines, past lives, PSI energies and so on, but as of right now that doesn't seem likely.  People could lose their jobs.

More proof of something.

So, we have to be a little vigilant, because just as a giant corporation like Monsanto can do the Science-stomp all over small farmers with GMO contamination and then throw around words like "Coexistence", we certainly don't need them Scientisters co-opting and "co-existing" with the New Agey stuff.

They just ain't earned it.

Love Profaned...

There are dangers inherent in living in the Technosphere.  Right now, the Technosphere involves three things: people (you), Money and Machines.  The three things are currently all stuck together.  People get all caught up with their machines, and then there's always the struggle for more money, which is basically fear--of not having enough, losing what you've got, and so on.

The most important thing to remember when playing in the Technosphere is that while you're in this falseness, this trance-state, it is all dependent on another sphere that it cleverly obscures.  You could call that the Biosphere. Once, that was all there was.

 The Biosphere met his every need for 50,000 years.

You can figure out where this is going.  Today, an email came in from Apple, Inc. praising the "iPad".  Like the corporation Paypal, which touts itself as "the most-loved" way to get paid, the iPad also is ready to co-opt Love itself to ensure the dominance of the machine and money over your welfare and happiness.

 

Oh, Hoffman, they don't really mean "Love", do they? 

I can think of an infinite number of things an iPad can't do, and one is actually provide Love.  But, Love is becoming a "power" word in Technosphere propaganda, so are you being a good little monkey and falling for it?  Put your head in the noose, now.

The latent power of your own terrestrial life itself has been matched by a pocket-sized machine.

Here's something pharmaceutical companies don't want you to know: drugs don't heal you, they make you sick.  It's actually your body that heals you.  So what do machines do? 

Machines don't improve your life, they take your life away.  

They do this by distracting you.

ADDENDUM: 4/09/13

 

EBay's latest campaign again tries to employ "Love" for its own commercial gain, this time encouraging people to unquestioningly accept the idea that we can actually love "things"--inanimate objects.

The good news is that these sorts of pleas are desperate acts, brought about by diminishing revenues and shifting cultural paradigms.

They know that the human appetite for more "things" is decreasing.

Connection Disconnect...

I just placed the following on my Facebook page:

Hey all you guys and goils-- I am online only on Mondays and Thursdays from here on out, so if there's a lag in my replying to you I'm sorry but that's why.

I've made some decisions about my computer usage, and have decided that I want my old life back. After the first three days of cold turkey some Beta waves actually came back to my brain again. The days got longer and I thought in a way I ha

dn't for many, many years.

I thought about FB, too--and for all the promise of "connection", which to some degree it does do, there's also a tremendous "disconnect" as I sit here alone in front of a computer.

I am sure this weird duality has a lot to do with why FB is so successful and popular, it appeals directly to the "Self" and then each self nurtures itself with a little piece of every other "self". It's like a school of Piranhas eating itself.

And as we all sit here alone and connected/disconnected, the Powers That Be make billions selling our information, as you may already know. What are we really getting back, except another freakin' habit?

I also contemplated this: if every online "message" (ad, email or FB posting, etc.) was a knock at the door, how fast would I stop answering it altogether? How about you?

And I asked myself: when was the last time I got an email that I treasured so much that I actually wanted to print out and keep, like a "real" letter? I'm not sure I ever have, so I want to try real letters again. I may send you one!

I really think that if I didn't have to use a PC to run my business I'd toss the thing in the trash. The way it is, twice a week to handle orders and emails is enough. I HOPE it's enough.

It's bold, and it's radical, but I am going back to Paper and long, quiet afternoons. If you care or dare to join me, I'd like to hear about your experience.

We're like astronauts, going where other fear to tread; going full in the face of fashion, trends, technology, against the tide that is sucking away our lives...

Boob Tube Continued...

This image recently arrived from my friends at the MCBA, or Minnesota Comic Book Association, which is a non-profit organization that puts on conventions.  I like their shows and have attended a bunch of them as a guest.

"Fabletown" claims to be a sort of Comic Book Renaissance movement turning away from Superheroes.  This art could be Adam Hughes, I don't know.  I realize that most Comic fans would find this pretty innocuous, and certainly not "Porn" in the familiar sense, but take a closer look.

First, you get every "flavor" of woman:  blond, brunette (or brown), redheaded and black hair. All bases are covered there. And, not only are the women as slim and elongated as any fashion model, they also have massively pendulous breasts completely out of proportion to their body-types.  For their breasts to be this freakishly large would require either implants or some incredible rare genetics.

They are also depicted in bed, and their expressions reflect joy, exuberance or pensiveness.  You can fill in the rest yourselves without more ethics lectures from Hoffman, but my salient point is that this stuff is still more objectification and exploitation of women, and that fact that it's front-and-center as a promotional image doesn't say much good about the health of Comics generally or of this new- self-proclaimed "break" from the status quo, "Fabletown".

It's no break at all, kids--it's exactly more of the same.

Why Tarzan Matters...

Here's an essay I wrote a few months ago about Tarzan:

As a fictional character, Tarzan stands in stark contrast against modern Man.  Whereas Tarzan is fully integrated into the natural world of the Jungle, today's man only sees it from afar, as if through the wrong end of a microscope, as something outside himself, to be studied and probed with his Intellect and judged by his ego for whatever technological or monetary profits it may yield.

Authentic feral children have not as yet displayed many of the character traits of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan, although we cannot be absolutely sure due to their apparent limitations of language and therefore thought.  But it has been shown that they live fairly effortlessly in Nature compared to us, oblivious, for example, to our arguably paranoid notions about shelter and cold. 

Amazonian tribes today who have been insulated from modern civilization, and some Australian Aborigines, for example, function within their environments and know its flora and fauna intimately.  In comparison, we  know something about the flora in our gut only as it relates to our health and therefore our ability to contribute to the prevailing economic system, and we understand in generalities a few things about the Earth's lifeforms as they appear on the other side of the glass of our video screens.  But as a rule we live in a severe state of near-complete  disconnection from other lifeforms.

What we have failed to understand, or even feel, is that Nature does not stop at the edge of a TV screen, or at the outlying parts of our bodies, because Nature is our bodies.  And we deny this truth at our own peril.  Ours is an age of chronic ill-health, and everyone knows someone who suffers from its characteristic ailments: high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, obesity, depression and so on.  Could Tarzan ever be "depressed"? 

Certainly Tarzan had emotions and could feel sadness and loss, but to create depression he would have to become a full-time astronaut completely disconnected from the Earth--exactly what we have become through our technologically-based lifestyles.  And why so much illness, and so little cure?  What is at the core of this epidemic of sickness that grows and grows no matter how much money and science we hurl at it?  And how can a fictional character almost 100 years old realistically help us?  Is Tarzan today obsolete--as ridiculous a figure as George of the Jungle?

Today, our predicament is that we become sick because we deny ourselves, our core natures, as a part of greater Nature.  When we use electric lights to artificially extend the length of the day, our minds may know it is night, but our bodies--and our endocrine systems and other light-sensitive cellular machineries--think that the longer days mean Summer.  And what is typically mammalian behavior in Summer?  To gorge on as much carbohydrates and sugars as possible to put on fat for the coming Winter. 

But today, for us, that "Winter" never comes, but the gorging goes on unabated year-round.  Grocery stores sell "low-fat" foods which still make us fat due to their high carb/sugar content.  A bear, for example, ready for hibernation, exhibits all the symptomology of modern man's ill health: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, pre-cancerous tissues, obesity, stress, depression and so on.  These "feast" traits all vanish after the "famine" of Winter, and the animal is healthy once more and ready to begin the cycle again.

We also are animals, and it is informative that animals in Nature do not get get cancer or diabetes, and they don't need to eat "low-fat" or jog to "keep their heart-rates up".  But our animals, our pets and most livestock, do get our diseases--and why?  Because they live with us, eat our food, and bask in our artificially long days.

Most if not all these problems can be solved by re-synchronizing our bodies with the Sun, waking and sleeping within the day-night cycle, and cutting out most carbohydrates and sugars. That is, eating and behaving like cavemen, or more singularly, like Tarzans. 

The other option is to continue on our present course of disconnection and sickness, in which the human organism basically evolves into a new form, a form that cannot connect with the natural world, cannot feed properly and cannot reproduce, because it is converting to a state of deadness.  Because, when Nature has no need for an animal, it kills it.  And the Nature in our bodies has decided that we are no longer necessary to it/ourselves and therefore we must die.

And we are doing all we can to help the process along.

My own experience with Tarzan started long ago with a Sunday afternoon movie on television in the mid-1960s.  I remember African natives being lashed to tied-down trees and then being torn in half alive as the ropes were cut and the bent-over trees released.  As a child I squirmed over that crotch-ripping horror.  But my next exposure was far more sedate--an abridged version of Tarzan of the Apes as published by the Whitman company.  I read it voraciously and spent hours studying its colorfully green cover artwork with its idealization of Tarzan, who I thought resembled my father only with hair on top.

Most recently I re-read Irwin Porges' entire Edgar Rice Burroughs biography and Phillip Jose Farmer's excellent Tarzan Alive.  With both of these books and some of the preceding elements of this essay in mind I dove into the green "jungle" of South Carolina for a two-and-a-half month vacation, spending as much time as possible synchronized with the Sun and Moon, living on "caveman" food like nuts, berries, fruit and meat, sleeping in a cave (my van) and wandering the river's edge in the heat.

What I found out there, alone and solitary like a real-life Tarzan, was an experience that didn't require
words or intellectual explanation; as I watched groups of buzzards scouring the shores for food, I saw
them not as part of a Wild Kingdom TV program but respectfully as my competitors for a limited food supply.  Animals like butterflies and baby turtles that were not in competition were seen with wonder and reverence, and like the plant life all around, not as separate selves but as all as part of a tapestry of Life at which I was the thoughtful and meditative center. 

Even as I later returned North to Wisconsin to reunite with my wife and children, driving hungrily past horrid and garish fast-food restaurants on the highway, I began instinctively looking at birds, possible fish in rivers, and even roadkill as sustenance.  At rest stops I saw people's pets and wanted to eat them.  I was returning to the Winter Land of the North, like some sun-browned Ice-Age cave man back from the hunt carrying nourishment for his family.

But while I was in those hot jungles of the South, where not another living man or woman was in sight, at those times I felt--and I could only express it in one way--that I was Tarzan.

My personal feeling is that Tarzan as a character needs to be put to rest, not only because he is so incredibly irrelevant today, but also so that new creations can fill the space he's occupying.  At this point, he is little more than a distraction, and a warm-and-fuzzy experience for fandomites which they grasp at over and over again trying to recapture some lost original thrill which now is forever gone.  It has become a meaningless, repetitive gesture.

My essay, Why Tarzan Matters, was, I felt, about the only authentically important thing that can be said about the character.  I predict that most Burroughs enthusiasts will likely find little use for it.

Tarzan was a picture of health but his followers are lingering.

 

Live and Learn...

It's with a mixture of pain and pleasure that I announce the retirement of my Afrobat comics numbers 1 and 2.  They sold reasonably well, and I initially designed them in the mode of 1970s Underground Comix, very much in the vein of Grass Green's work.  You could probably add in some elements from Blaxploitation films and a little Kirby storytelling and you'd more or less have it.

Part of the decision stemmed from my copping a copy of Spoken Soul, the Story of Black English, from a library sale down South a few months ago.  I read the chapters about Ebonics, and about the so-called "Ebonics jokes".  That was part of the recall action, but the main thrust was a half-buried memory of a Comic convention about a year ago...

What happened there was typical of any fan's search for graphic fulfillment, but in this case a Black man's eyes scavenged the table-tops and locked onto the African-Afro of my Afrobat comics.  He had his two young sons with him, and bought both issues.  At the time I pocketed the cash and thought little of it, but later I admit some shame that he likely expected a real superhero and instead got ridicule of his race.

I am not happy at the prospect of kicking people when they are down, and to African-Americans, that's partly what Afrobat does.  Had I made clever wordplay that parodied White language, like "collateral damage" etc., the pain wouldn't be as great as when inflicted on a people so downtrodden and victimized for so long.  Even now when Whitey gets uptight, they seek out the same old Whipping Boy, perhaps now in the useful form of "Welfare Queens", and get straight to work.

So, my own aptitude with language, grammar and dialects directs my mind to create wordplays like "Himalayan over there", which might be funnier if they were directed at the wealthy and powerful instead of African-Americans who suffer at the bottom of society.  The salient point here is that Ebonics "jokes" basically say that these people are too stupid to speak "properly".

So, my feelings of guilt and shame over this are expressed in the retraction of Afrobat.  Maybe he'll be back someday in another form, more kind, compassionate and loving.