Em oi! Vacation, day 4

It is hard not to observe that the average American these days enjoys a good meal. Food is everywhere, cookbooks are bestsellers (despite the demise of cooking), and there are even two full cable networks devoted to cooking shows. Cruises, as the phenomenal Dave Barry has pointed out, exacerbate the problem, since there’s an actual rule that you cannot be on a cruise ship and not eating. Still, when I get stuck standing in line for a sandwich behind a man who is in his left hand holding the crust of a pizza he just finished consuming before lumbering up to the deli window to order something with extra cheese and extra mayo. And then, before leaving the window, to see the man just leave the pizza crust on the counter instead of turning around and putting it in the waste basket five feet behind him. Well, I start to feel a little snappish toward other human beings.

It’s true.

This particular cruise had all of the rooms named for Impressionist painters. I am damned if I know why. All of the Impressionists were male and white, of course; the only room named after a woman was the Cassatt Lounge and no one went in there. That was weird. The restaurant on the Lido deck (the buffet) was named The Cezanne. It had this painting hung several times on its walls:

That was weird because it was hung at irregular intervals, as though the decorator of the ship had assumed that either no one would notice that there were several iterations of the painting or perhaps was unable to get more than three different Cezanne paintings to cover the entirety of the large room, thus necessitating the repetition. Bryan and I, working on our various projects, sat at a table for an hour or so and contemplated the judgmental features of this particular lady.

This comic is filed under: NC1763.V3 L86 2012b, for Drawing. Design. Illustration–Caricature. Pictorial humor and satire–Special subjects, A-Z–Vacations. For more comics from this trip, check out: Vacation, Day 1.

To finish things up, here is another photo. This one was taken in Mexico, but I guess it could have been about anywhere. It reminds me of an important principle in my photography, which is that photographs tend to turn out better if I get as close as possible to the subject. Also, they turn out better if I use autofocus, since my poor eyesight means that I sometimes manually focus the lens into fuzziness. Oops.

Em oi! Vacation–day 1

The TSA guy let me mail the knife back to myself. This is a service provided by the old ladies at the customer service and information desk at the airport in Milwaukee. They buy the envelopes, take enough to cover postage, and drop the packages off on their way home after work. I have nothing mean or sarcastic to say about the people at MKE. They were super nice and classy. Also there is a Recombobulation Area at the airport.

UGH. So this happens sometimes with stretch denim I guess? I had a (really new) pair of jeans go when I was in Baltimore in October. I guess I’m going back on my diet for now.

The flight wouldn’t have been SO bad, except that at 21:00 (9pm) my 12-hour cough syrup wore off, so the last three hours of travel were all spent coughing my lungs out. Super lame. After we got to our hotel (about 1:00am) we called a nearby greasy spoon and got greasy, greasy food delivered to us. And we ate it while sitting on the carpet and watching the Discovery Channel. And then we slept for like ten hours, except for me because I woke up coughing at 8am and went for a run.

These are a couple of comics I drew on day one of our trip. I’ll have some more as the week goes on–it turns out they take a fair amount of time to clean up, since I sketched them freehand in pen. We’ll file them under NC1763.V3 L86 2012, for Drawing. Design. Illustration–Caricature. Pictorial humor and satire–Special subjects, A-Z–Vacations.

Here’s a photograph which I took with my new camera. I think it is one of the best I have taken of late.

It’s at least half not me though–it’s hard to get a bad photo of Sam (my sister-in-law).

Em ơi! #354: The First Tragedy of the 21st Century

File under DS932 .L86 2011, for History of Asia—Korea—Democratic People’s Republic, 1948-—General Works.

Considering how obsessed I have been with North Korea over the past couple of years, I am a little surprised that I haven’t drawn any comics about Kim Jong-il before. I did find this one about Kim Il-sung I drew about three years ago:

File this one under DS932 .L86 2009.

If you’re looking for a good book on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea as it’s typically known here in the West, I recommend:

Martin, Bradley K. Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty. N.P.: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006.
–At over 800 pages, an exhaustive look at the Kim personality cult.

Myers, B. R. The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves – And Why it Matters. New York: Melville House, 2010.
–In many ways a refutation of everything Martin claims, this book is both short and immensely readable.

Church, James. A Corpse in the Koryo. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006.
–A brilliant little pot-boiler of a mystery written by a guy who gives Raymond Chandler a run for his money. Allegedly very accurate with regards to DPRK society.

As a warning, a lot of defector memoirs have, uh, cannibalism. A lot of it.

I’m leaving on vacation tomorrow (Thursday) and won’t be back until the beginning of 2012, so have a good Saturnalia without me. I’m off to spend Hanukkah in Santa Monica (well, New Orleans and points south, but that doesn’t rhyme).

While we’re talking about books, here’s what I’m reading:

(All links provided for ease of reference only; I am not receiving any kick-backs from Amazon.)

I feel very diverse. What are you reading this winter, anything good? If you have recommendations, feel free to leave them. I do so love hearing about what people are reading.

Em oi! #353: Dog Dreams

I should have one more comic this week. Then I’ll be on vacation until January.

This is based on an actual dream of Bryan’s. It wasn’t that the dog was speaking which surprised him, but that the dog had started using appositives. But then again, she did receive an honorary DFA for her first birthday, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when she begins to use advanced grammatical structures.

File this one under: BF1099.L35 L86 2011, for Parapsychology–Dreaming–Special topics, A-Z–Language and Languages.

Em ơi! #352: Open to Interpretation

Bryan tells me that this comic reminds him of #303: Playing it Safe. I think the swearing teddy bear is still one of his favorite characters. It reminds me of the previous one I did with Derrida and his cat (I can’t seem to find ANY of the Derrida ones offhand. Weird.)

I will tell you something about the last panel: When I started looking up female philosophers, I noticed that 2/5 of them (Hypatia and Tullia) had nude portraits on their Wikipedia pages. I’ve never seen a nude painting of any male philosopher, including Socrates, who was a dirty old man and totally asking for it. If you want to know what society values in a woman, there it is. Hypatia: Mathematician. Philosopher. Astronomer. Naked.

Seriously, I can count on one hand the number of female philosophers I read (Philippa Foot was the major one) and on zero hands the number of pre-20th century female philosophers I read. That’s kind of screwed up.

Anyway, enough of that.

This comic is filed under NX652.P47 L86 2011 for Arts in general–Characters, persons, classes of persons, and ethnic groups–By name of character, person, class of persons, or ethnic groups A-Z–Philosophers.

Em ơi! #351: Hardly Ever

I swear I will have a post which is not about my ankle soon. I actually have a comic drawn but not inked which is about philosophy. So maybe by the weekend that will be ready to go. I’m actually back to running on a limited (i.e., 3-5 miles at a time) basis; no speed work yet, I’m just happy to be back on my feet after seven fucking weeks. Don’t tell my PT.

Today I biked home at 17:15. Not too late, but now that daylight has been saved again the sun sets at 16:30 around these parts. I have a light on my bike, but before today I’d only tested it in somewhat “low light” conditions, like biking on a cloudy, foggy day, so I wasn’t really sure how well it was going to do in the total darkness.

A lot of the bike path between campus and my house has no street lamps. It turns out that my lamp, which is a little bluish-white LED, casts just enough light that I can see the edge of the path and the centerline and that’s about it. I have no reference for how fast I’m going beyond my own feelings of exertion. I have no idea what that crash in the undergrowth was–someone’s dog? A bear?

There are bears around here.

Eventually I turned off the bike path and onto the street for about the last three miles to my house. It’s hard to explain if you’re not a biker how weird and scary it feels to be biking down these streets at night, knowing that the blinking red LEDs on the back of my helmet are all that are protecting me from a broken neck. Drivers just don’t understand the power that their cars have, or they over-estimate their reaction speeds or their ability to multi-task. That’s why, despite all the studies of how stupid it is to text or talk on a cell phone and drive at the same time, people still do it. I see it all the time when I run in the morning, people on their cell phones swerving into the bike lane and out of it.

When you’re on foot, running against traffic, it’s easy to feel like you have some measure of control. If someone swerves into your path, you can see them coming. You have the option of throwing yourself into the ditch. When you’re biking, you go with traffic, so they come from behind you. You are also clipped to the bike. Picture this: You are making your way down a hill between street lights and suddenly headlights from behind overwhelm your little light. You think that this could be it, they could be texting and just not see you, despite the blinking red LEDs. You brace. And then they pull past you and the darkness closes in again. You and the bike fly onward, silently, in a little blue patch of light, hurtling toward infinity.

I’m filing this comic under RC935.T4 L86 2011 for
Internal medicine–Specialties of internal medicine–Diseases of the musculoskeletal system–Other diseases of the musculoskeletal system, A-Z–Tendinitis.

em ơi! #350: we must imagine Sisyphus…

As it says, about three and a half weeks ago I developed peroneal tendonitis in my left ankle. This is fun because it is the opposite foot from the one I hurt during my last marathon training cycle. As usual, I am surprised by how stupid my coping skills get without being able to run. This has really been a voyage of discovery vis-à-vis my terrible neurotic dark side. I’d like to claim I’ve learned a lot about myself and will no longer be bothered by the same problems. That might sort of be true…but I have a feeling that I’m not completely over some of these things.

But, my story: I was pretty depressed and feeling bad about how I was going to miss my marathon, and sort of in denial about the whole thing. I’d made a PT appointment but hadn’t gone in yet, and as I was biking down I came up with this script. Drawing this comic was really the first step in feeling better, because it was when I came up with it that I started to be able to laugh at myself again. So long as I do not take my problems too seriously, I think I can overcome anything. (And also I should point out that I overcame quite a bit of writer’s block, or comic artist’s block I guess? in order to post this. And I don’t actually even believe in writer’s block!)

For what it’s worth, the PT was actually very nice and told me about his own running-related injuries.

Learning from experience
The thing is, I should have known this was coming. Last year, when I subluxed my cuboid bone, the PT did a gait analysis and decided that I pronate too much. Everyone pronates a little (it means when you step, your foot rolls to the outside). But I do it a lot, and since I also have stretchy ligaments in my ankles, this puts a lot of pressure on them. If I want to wear the minimalist shoes I’ve been wearing (and I do), I have to do exercises to keep the muscles in my ankles strong. I wasn’t doing those consistently, so I got hurt.

In Baltimore, missing my marathon, a doctor friend gave me a brace to control the lateral movement of my ankle while I strengthen the little muscles in the area. In addition to preventing lateral movement, the brace prevents…well, it makes non-lateral movement difficult as well, I have to take a step with the good leg, then kind of post off the bad one–I’m sure it’s hilarious for all of those watching me. But I can run with a minimum amount of pain.

Yesterday I was hobbling around the track at the SERF and a guy blows past me in the outside lane. Not too surprising, I was running maybe a 10:15 mile (yikes, how the mighty have fallen). Anyway, he was going flat out, wearing Vibram FiveFingers, and he was really over-striding, so that he hit the ground heel-first pretty far in front of his body. I watched him do this pretty consistently for several laps (I had a lot of time to observe), and when I watched him stretch he was rolling out his ankles like they were bothering him. I wondered if I should have stopped and said, “Hey, you need to fix your gait before you wind up like me.” In my mind, one big problem with minimalist shoes is that it can be hard to tell if you’re doing it wrong, and to prove this both Bryan (who runs in VFFs) and I have been through periods of injury all summer (Bryan is sorted out now, thankfully, and I will be soon). Given that I know perhaps more than the average undergrad, and given that I was observant enough to notice all this, should I have said something?

I don’t know. I didn’t. If I see him again, I probably will.

Filing this comic under: RC1220.M35 L86 2011, for Internal medicine — Special situations and conditions — Sports medicine — Medical and physiological aspects of special activities. By activity, A-Z — Marathon running. Good times.

Em oi! #349: This is historically accurate

I’ve spent most of the summer reading about colonialism, specifically the French in Indochina.

I can hear you already saying, “Wow, that’s incredibly…depressing, that’s the word.”

Bryan actually teased me the other day, saying I don’t read anything that’s not about libraries, Buddhism, or colonialism. Which is largely true…and I still find myself wishing they overlapped more–for example, the book I was reading made mention of some colonial libraries founded in Cambodia, but didn’t give much information about them.

Anyway, I came to wonder how the French had actually wound up running Indochina–the book didn’t cover that aspect of stuff, and I slept through the last history class I had in high school. (Does this make me a poor historian? Is it bad I’ve spent my summer writing two historical papers for publication? Hm.) So this is what I came up with. Of course, I eventually looked it up and found that the French won Vietnam and Cambodia in the Sino-French War in 1884-1885. Then they won Laos in the Franco-Siamese War of 1886.

I’m pretty sure I had other stuff to say about this comic, but it has flown my head. I’ve had a busy summer and I’m really pretty tired. I wrote, as I mentioned, the bulk of two papers intended for publication; I rewrote a novella; I took (and aced) two semesters of Thai; I held down two jobs (now three). I ran an average of 47 miles and biked an average of 92 miles per week. And I slept…well, let’s not talk about that. I’ve also done five races–two triathlons (one of which became an Olympic-length duathlon, one of which was a sprint), a 5k (got 2nd in my age group), a 10-miler (got 9th in my age group I think), and a half marathon (came in 46th out of 300-something).

I have been busy, is what I’m trying to say. And now I’m tired.

This comic is filed under HC279 .L86 2011 for Economic history and conditions–By region or country–Europe–France–Colonies, which carries the note, “Includes exploitation and economic conditions.”

Em ơi! #348: Zombie Summer

ROWAN I FINISHED THIS ONE FOR YOU.

I had a lovely lunch with my friend Rowan today, and complained a bit about not having time to finish this comic, which I have been working on since the 5th of July. She was all kinds of sympathetic, and mentioned that she checks the site every Friday religiously. So actually I had another two days to finish it…but when my homework took until 21:00 to complete and it became apparent that no running would be happening tonight, I decided just to scan it and get it over with.

The comic is real though; if Maya didn’t pull so hard on the leash when we walked out the door, we would probably not move forward. I would just fall asleep on my feet in the doorway. Then the cat would get out and Maya would go crazy and something tragic would happen. The end.

Technically speaking, you’re supposed to teach the dog not to pull on the leash. And I do try to discourage it during every other walk we go on during the day (typically two to three of them). But at 6:15, my brain is not available to process that kind of information let alone act on it.

I had a lot to write about, but it has slipped from my mind, probably because it is so hot outside. Oh well. Next time, I’ll do something fun about colonialism, since that is all I read about nowadays. Whee!

This one is getting filed under NC825.M6 L86 2011 for

Drawing. Design. Illustration–Special subjects (Technique, history, and collection)–Other subjects, A-Z–Monsters.

It turns out there is no specific subject heading for zombies under drawing. However film and folklore both have zombie sub-categories. Clearly an oversight.

I should add that this was a trial with pen and ink–the dog seems like an ideal subject since she’s furry, and I thought pen and ink might bring that out…I may need a different type of paper though. And more practice. We’ll see.

Okay, bedtime.

Illuminations: A Picture for Jesse and Keith

My cousin Jesse got married in June to a really great guy named Keith.

I just looked through all of our wedding photos and was unable to find any with both of them in it! So here’s an amusing picture of Jesse alone with a large drink:

And here’s a photo of the two of them from Daniel and Claire’s wedding:

Click any of the photos to embiggen them, by the way.

Last year when Daniel and Clarie got married, I made a very fancy comic for them (this.) I knew I couldn’t let Jesse and Keith get married without doing something equally cool.

BUT there was a problem. I was around for all of Daniel and Claire’s courtship, so I could recount it in comic form. Jesse…was in Evanston, IL doing her doctoral work when she met Keith, and although I met him (through the magic of the internets) fairly early on, I wasn’t privy to the details of their life…and to call up and ask for some details would give the game away. So I had to come up with something else.

What I eventually did was an illumination. Jesse, see, is a medievalist, and Keith is…well, not a medievalist but he likes her. It made sense at the time. Go with it.

Anyway, I wanted to take a moment to post some of the in-progress photos, since this project consumed most of May and June and overall I’m pretty happy with how it came out. I’ll offer a little commentary on how I came up with the design, just in case anyone is curious.

On the left here we have my first sketch of the design. As you can see, I initially wanted to do Jesse’s name in a pseudo-Hebrew font and Keith’s name in a way that reflected his heritage somehow. On the right is a closeup of some early attempts at that. Above his name is the phrase, “A Musical Representation of Staggering is my Amy Winehouse Coverband.” So we can date this to the night we went to the Jonathan Coulton/Paul and Storm show at the Majestic, which I think was late April (around the 24th).

You might also note that this version of the picture had small portraits of both Jesse and Keith in it.

The Initials

On the left, an early sketch of the J and the K initials. The design for the J was fairly easy; Jesse had listed an illuminated Haggadah on the registry (this one, in fact) so I just tried to make the J similar. But what to do about the K?

First I thought, well, Keith is African-American, I could do something using African patterns. But A) what part of Africa? It’s a huge country full of lots of different cultures. B) Anyway, he’s not African, he’s African-American. C) Also, isn’t that kind of weird, like othering or racializing or…I don’t know. Something. I started thinking at this point about traditional African-American art…which is mostly musical. First I thought, “Oh, the blues were invented by Picasso because he couldn’t afford other colors of paint.“* So that should be an easy solution, just make it blue.

All kidding aside, I wasn’t entirely sure how to go from music to visual representation. And the main difference between me and a real artist is that I decided, instead of solving this problem, to change tracks. I made the Ks in the center and right. I put little finials on them in the style of the national wat in Vientiane (Laos) because Keith calls himself a “secular Buddhist” on his Facebook page.

I’m deep.

The first version of the Layout.

On the left: some various small letters. I was trying to learn Caroline or Carolingian Minuscule. Since I’m not a monk, it took a lot of practice. On the right, an early layout for the dog/flowers. Of course, when I put everything together, the layout had to change.

Putting it all together:

This one also shows some experimentation with the swirly orange things and the lettering.**

After I’d settled on a design, all that was left was sketching it, inking and coloring it, and then framing it.

That’s not a terrific photo, but it’s the only one I have. And it did end up blue, but more because of the Scrovegni Cappella by Giotto (in Padua, Italy) that I toured with Jesse in 2002 or 2003.

Thanks for coming along on this journey with me. I hope you found it interesting, at least. Now no one else get married for a couple of months, I need to finish my novel.

* I’m super good at art history. I even own a blue guitar. True story.
** Swirly orange things taken from a Tibetan tapestry I found, I think. Because of the Buddhist thing.